Grapho-morphological awareness in Spanish L2 reading: how do learners use this metalinguistic skill?

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on the transferability of grapho-morphological awareness (GMA) for second language (L2) learners by analysing L2 learners’ knowledge of morphology in reading. GMA helps readers to identify grammatical categories, infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and access stored lexical information. Previous research indicates that L2 GMA is influenced by first language (L1) GMA. In this paper, L1 Spanish speakers (n = 30) and L1 English speakers learning Spanish as an L2 (n = 46) completed two timed lexical decision tasks in English (only English speakers) and Spanish, a reading task, a Cloze Task, and an oral interview (only English speakers). Results indicate that L2 learners show a native-like word recognition pattern, providing evidence for language-specific processing. Also, L2 learners could recognise and decompose words into morphemes and roots throughout the different tasks, which implies that they neither ignore morphology nor follow a whole-word reading approach. The results suggest that intermediate L2 learners with an L1 alphabetic writing system can develop a native-like GMA in an alphabetic L2, and that the relationship between proficiency and GMA is reciprocal.

Keywords:

• metalinguistic awareness
• metalinguistic knowledge
• reading strategies
• SLA
• transfer
• second language learning

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge Alan Juffs, Erin O’Rourke, Greg Mizera, Kimmy Rehak, Adrienne R. Washington, and Carrie Bonilla for their comments on previous versions of this article, and Elaine Rubinstein for her statistical help and advice. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.