Morphological Awareness and Chinese Children's Literacy Development: An Intervention Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese children's literacy development. Of the 169 children from elementary schools in Beijing, China, who participated in the study, about half received enhanced instruction on the morphology of characters and words in the first and second grade. At the beginning of second grade and at the beginning of third grade, children were tested on morphological awareness, reading, and writing. The results showed that morphological instruction substantially improved children's performance on the morphological awareness and literacy measures. The best-fitting structural equation models suggested a unidirectional causal relation in early second grade and a reciprocal relation in early third grade between morphological awareness and children's literacy development.

Notes

¹Throughout the article, we use second and third grade to denote the test time, but indeed performance on the tests reflected children's development in first and second grade.

²How to name the connections between form and meaning in pictographic characters, ideographic characters, and semantic radicals is a matter of some awkwardness since these forms have no counterpart in alphabet writing systems and do not fall within the scope of standard morphological analysis. We will use the expression graphomorphological features to indicate connections between form and meaning that are present in written language but not in spoken language. To keep the language from being too cumbersome, we have sometimes used morphological awareness as an umbrella term that includes graphomorphological awareness.

^aWrite characters, make words, make characters scores are shown in number of correct characters or words.

^bReading fluency scores are shown in number of characters read per minute in correctly verified sentences.

^aThe correlation was not significant.

^bThe correlation was significant, p < .05.

^aThe correlation was not significant.

^bThe correlation was significant, p < .05.

³The data structure is hierarchical with children clustered within classrooms/schools (three experimental classrooms from schools A and B, three control classrooms from schools A, C, and D). Though there were too few schools or classrooms to evaluate effects at these levels, it is important to note that there was little variance attributable to classrooms/schools per se. The students from the three experimental classrooms in two schools performed similarly. So did the students from the three control classrooms in three schools. The students in the experimental classroom in school A performed significantly better than the students in the control classroom in that school.

∗ p < .05

∗∗ p < .01.