Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English

Abstract

Substantial biliteracy research on two alphabetic languages has indicated that, once it is fostered in the first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading. It is still unclear, however, whether L1 metalinguistic awareness transfers in the same manner across typologically different languages, and to what extent and under what conditions transfer occurs. This paper synthesises eight studies on the transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English. Three questions guided this research: (1) how was morphological awareness defined and measured in prior work; (2) what are the patterns of transfer between the two languages; and (3) what are the factors that affect such transfer effects? The findings have shown a lack of consistency in measuring morphological awareness in existing studies; there were small-to-moderate correlations between L1 and L2 morphological awareness in Chinese–English bilingual reading development; and L2 exposure and task demands were shown to have notable impacts on the cross-linguistic transfer. It is suggested that much needs to be done to expand our understanding of how morphological awareness functions as a sharable resource in bilingual reading development.

Keywords:

• morphological awareness
• transfer
• biliteracy
• second language reading
• cross-linguistic

Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate comments from the reviewers and editors. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. An oft-cited language-specific facet of morphological awareness in Chinese is semantic radical awareness (e.g. Zhang, Koda, & Sun, 2014). This is not included in the discussion of this synthesis for the following reasons: (1) semantic radical awareness does not qualify for being one dimension of morphological awareness according to the widely-cited definition in extant literature: morphological awareness refers to the ability to analyse a word's morpheme constituents in visual word processing for the purpose of meaning construction (Carlisle, 1995, 2000; see also Kuo & Anderson, 2006, 2008). Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a (spoken) language. Semantic radical in Chinese is not a morpheme but a sublexical orthographic unit that carries semantic cues. (2) We agree that word processing in Chinese involve multilevel interaction at the sublexical and lexical levels. Yet, it seems that previous studies have overstated the contribution of semantic radicals to Chinese word meaning retrieval. Many of them focused on single characters, less representative of contemporary Chinese written words (Lexicon of Common Words in Contemporary Chinese Research Team, 2008), the majority of which are two- and three-character words (84%). Moreover, it should be noted that the semantic cues provided by semantic radicals are not always consistent and reliable (Chung & Leung, 2008). (3) Based on (1) and (2), we propose that research on orthographic awareness, ortho-morphological awareness, and semantic radical awareness in Chinese is worth examining. But it does not fit in the scope of this synthesis.

2. Even though readers may be more familiar with Cohen's d as an effect size measure based on studies with mean differences across independent groups or with matched groups, or with pre–post designs, this review focused on correlation (r) between two continuous variables, which is based on studies that examined the transfer of morphological awareness between L1 and L2 within one group (Borenstein, Hedges, Higgins, & Rothstein, 2009). We also noted that although specific effect sizes based on correlations have been proposed for Second Language Acquisition research (0.4 being a small effect; 0.7 medium; and 1.0 considered as a large effect), they should not be taken as the ‘golden’ rules (Oswald & Plonsky, 2010). Following this set of rules, the unique contributions of morphological awareness would be taken as small, which might lead to the underestimation of the relevance of morphological awareness for instructional practices (see also Nagy et al., 2014). In this review, we adopted Cohen's benchmarks, which have been widely used in meta-analyses to interpret the magnitude of correlation in social science (as cited in Li, Shintani, & Ellis, 2012, p. 12).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sihui Ke

Sihui Ke is a PhD candidate in second language acquisition at the Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She is interested in second language reading and biliteracy acquisition, psycholinguistics, foreign language assessment and instruction, and language planning and policy.

Feng Xiao

Feng Xiao is an assistant professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College, USA. His research interests are interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics, technology-enhanced learning, and statistical language learning.