Contribution of L2 morphological awareness to passage-level L2 reading comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners are aware of lexical and grammatical functions of certain suffixes in English. The study further aimed at exploring the unique contribution of L2 morphological awareness to passage-level L2 reading comprehension above and beyond such reading-related factors as vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge and reading strategy use. The data were collected from 87 EFL learners through a Morphological Awareness Test, a Survey of Reading Strategies, and tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, paired samples t-test, hierarchical multiple regression, and bivariate regression. The results of the study revealed that the participants show at least moderate awareness of English word morphology, and they could judge whether a morphologically complex word comes from a simple word better than they identified the lexical and grammatical functions of certain derivational suffixes in English. The results further revealed that L2 morphological awareness does not make a direct contribution to L2 reading comprehension but it might make an indirect contribution to it via its significant contribution to L2 vocabulary knowledge