The Role of Morphological Awareness in Academic Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension Skills of Adult ESL Learners.

摘要

This study examined if explicit morphology instruction makes a contribution to ESL learners' morphological awareness, academic vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills. An eight-week instruction under the name of Vocabulary Class was prepared, and the lessons were focused on raising awareness of students in morphology. In each lesson, three to four suffixes were presented, and students worked on tasks such as derivation, decomposition, creating nonsense words, and completing doze tests. The vocabulary class took two and a half hours of experimental groups' regular class time whereas the control group continued receiving the regular ESL instruction. At the end of the eight week instruction, the pre- and post-test scores of both groups were compared. The findings showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control group on the tests of morphological awareness, academic vocabulary, and reading comprehension skill. The study suggests that increasing morphological awareness of students helped perform better on the tests of morphological awareness, academic vocabulary and reading comprehension.;Key terms: morpheme, morphology, and morphological awareness.