Morphological awareness in biliteracy acquisition: A study of young Chinese EFL readers

Abstract

This study examined contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in two typologically diverse languages, focusing on young Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) readers in China. It was particularly interested in how cross-linguistic similarities and variations in morphological awareness affected its transfer in Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition. Grades 5 and 6 children were measured in compound awareness and reading comprehension in English, and compound awareness, radical awareness, and reading comprehension in Chinese. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that compound awareness contributed to reading comprehension within both Chinese and English. In addition, over and above English compound awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, Chinese compound awareness, but not radical awareness, explained a unique amount of variance in English reading comprehension. After Chinese compound awareness was controlled for, English compound awareness, however, did not make a significant contribution to Chinese reading comprehension. These findings were discussed in light of the common and language/script-dependent aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese and English and the context of biliteracy acquisition.

Keywords

Biliteracy cross-linguistic transfer English as a Foreign Language morphological awareness reading comprehension

1 Introduction

Recent theories of second-language (L2) reading and biliteracy acquisition argue that reading subskills, such as metalinguistic awareness, can be transferred from one language to facilitate reading development in another language, and the transfer facilitation effect may be governed by the typological distance between the two languages involved (Durgunoglu, 1997; Koda, 2005, 2008). Empirically, the transfer facilitation effect has been confirmed by some recent studies that examined the cross-linguistic relationship between morphological awareness and reading abilities (e.g., Deacon, Wade-Woolley, & Kirby, 2007; Ramirez, Chen, Geva, & Kiefer, 2010). However, how the effect is influenced by the linguistic distance between the languages of bilingual children or L2 learners has not been well explored, largely because existing studies very often focused only on typologically close languages, such as English and French (e.g., Deacon et al., 2007), and their morphological awareness measures often only covered a common or shared facet between the focal languages, such as derivation in English and Spanish (e.g., Ramirez et al., 2010). Consequently, whether and to what extent language/script-specific facets of morphological awareness could be transfer-ready in biliteracy acquisition has been unclear. Therefore, it is the objective of the present study to specifically explore the typological distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness. We chose to focus on biliteracy acquisition in Chinese and English, two typologically diverse languages. Because these two languages share as well as differ in their morphological structure, and clearly differ in how morphological information is encoded in orthography, a study of Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition provides a good opportunity to answer our question as to how cross-linguistic transfer of metalinguistic awareness reflects common as well as language/script-specific processes.

1.1 Morphological awareness and reading development

Morphological awareness pertains to the ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words (Carlisle, 2003; Kuo & Anderson, 2006). It is a multi-dimensional competence that entails different aspects and levels of insights. Emerging from spoken language acquisition in early childhood, children’s morphological awareness essentially reflects the morphological structure of their language. Because of the prevalence of morphologically complex words in print, previous research on monolingual children have revealed the importance of various facets of morphological awareness to reading development (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006).

Because morphological awareness entails morphological segmentation and manipulation skills, a fair amount of research has found that it is significant to development of word-reading ability among alphabetic as well as logographic readers (McBride-Chang et al., 2005). Carlisle and Nomanbhoy (1993) found that English-speaking first graders’ ability to produce derived forms of given English base words in a sentence context significantly predicted their word reading ability. Similarly, Singson, Mahony, & Mann (2000) showed that knowledge of English derivational affixes accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in word reading, after adjusting for phonemic awareness and vocabulary knowledge. In addition, phonological awareness gradually lost its contribution to English word reading as grade level increased; entered after morphological awareness, phonemic awareness barely contributed significantly to word reading beyond the third grade. Among studies on Chinese readers, McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat, and Wagner (2003) found the ability to distinguish meanings of Chinese homophones and compound word construction skills were significant predictors of single-character and two-character word reading among Hong Kong kindergarteners and second graders. A similar finding also surfaced in Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu, & Shu (2009), where Grades 1 and 2 children’s compound structure awareness, measured with a compound analogy task, significantly predicted their character reading ability.

Beyond word reading, morphological awareness has recently also been found to contribute to reading comprehension, even when other related reading subskills, such as vocabulary knowledge, were controlled for (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Li, Anderson, Nagy, & Zhang, 2002; McBride-Chang, Shu, Ng, Meng, & Penny, 2007; Nagy et al., 2006). This finding does not come as a surprise, given that morphological awareness, in addition to contributing to word reading, is also critical to inferring meanings of unknown complex words (Anglin, 1993; Wysocki & Jenkins, 1987). Children can use their morphological analysis skills to unlock meanings of novel morphologically complex words they encounter while reading. This “on the spot vocabulary learning” (Nagy, 2007, p. 64) can thus help children resolve their vocabulary gaps in reading and lead to better comprehension.

Among studies on morphological awareness and reading comprehension among English-speaking children, Mahony (1994) found that sensitivity to the structure of derived words distinguished between proficient and less proficient readers. Carlisle (2000) also reported that derivational knowledge accounted for a significant proportion of variance in reading comprehension, for both third and fifth graders, and the contribution was larger for the fifth grade than the third grade. This finding was supported by Nagy et al. (2006), which focused on children with more diverse grade levels. Longitudinally, Carlisle (1995) observed that English-speaking children’s Grade 1 derived word production ability significantly predicted their Grade 2 reading comprehension outcome. Such a longitudinal relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension was also found later in Deacon and Kirby (2004), which tracked a group of children for three years from Grade 3 to Grade 5.

So far, whether morphological awareness also contributes to Chinese reading comprehension has not been well explored. Ku and Anderson (2003) did a cross-linguistic comparison of how different facets (e.g., morpheme discrimination, meaning selection, etc.) of compound and derivational awareness developed in Grade 2, 4, and 6 English- and Chinese-speaking children, and how morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension among these groups of children. Directly related to the present discussion is the finding that similar to the English children, the Chinese children’s combined morphological awareness explained a unique amount of variance in their reading comprehension score, over and above vocabulary knowledge, and this pattern was invariant across all the three grades. McBride-Chang et al. (2007) found that compound structure awareness of Cantonese-speaking third graders in Hong Kong significantly predicted their Chinese reading comprehension, after the variance in age and phonological processing skills were accounted for.

1.2 Transfer of morphological awareness in biliteracy acquisition

L2 reading and biliteracy acquisition researchers generally concur that reading subskills, such as metalinguistic awareness, can be transferred across languages (e.g., Durgunoglu, 1997; Genesee, Geva, Dressler, & Kamil, 2006). Koda’s (2005, 2008) Transfer Facilitation Model, for instance, specifically predicts that transferred metalinguistic awareness of one language can provide top-down assistance for the development of reading and its related skills in another language; more importantly, the model also hypothesizes that the facilitation effect of metalinguistic awareness transfer is governed by the typological distance between the two languages, inasmuch as there are cross-linguistic similarities and variations in linguistic structure and the ways in which language (e.g., phonological and morphological) information is encoded in orthography. In other words, universal and language/script-specific processes (Geva & Wang, 2001; Toyoda & Scrimgeour, 2009), which have been previously identified in monolingual reading research, could also be manifested in biliteracy acquisition – common or shared facets of metalinguistic awareness tend to be more transfer-ready and provide strong cross-linguistic support in biliteracy acquisition, while language/script-specific facets may not show as strong a transfer facilitation effect as shared facets.

With regard to morphological awareness, its transfer facilitation effect has been confirmed in a small, but growing, body of research on bilingual or L2 reading acquisition. Ramirez et al. (2010) found that Spanish-speaking fourth- and seventh-grade English as a Second Language (ESL) learners’ knowledge of derivational affixes and morphological production ability in Spanish uniquely predicted their English word reading, after some related English variables were controlled for, suggesting a transfer facilitation effect of Spanish morphological awareness in the acquisition of English reading ability.

In Zhang et al.’s (2010) experimental study on young Chinese learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), one class of fifth graders was trained in Chinese compounding, one in English compounding, and the other two served as control. Comparison of students’ performance on an English compound analogy task revealed a significant intervention effect for English as well as Chinese intervention classes. The better English compound analogy ability displayed by the Chinese intervention class was particularly intriguing; it suggests an effect of cross-linguistic transfer of compound structure knowledge from Chinese to English in that the children applied the morphological insights they gained from the intervention on Chinese compounding in their analysis of English compound words.

Focusing on English-speaking children involved in a French immersion program, Deacon et al. (2007) tracked the development of the children’s ability to deal with past tense morphology and their word reading skills in both French and English from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Cross-linguistically, it was found that early measures of English morphological awareness significantly predicted French reading, over and above French morphological awareness and other related skills; in addition, later measures of French morphological awareness also predicted English reading after accounting for the effects of English morphological awareness, English vocabulary, and other skills. These findings suggested bidirectional transfer of morphological awareness, albeit different in pattern at different times, in French–English biliteracy acquisition.

Note that in the aforementioned studies, the two focal languages are typologically close and only a shared aspect of morphology was addressed. Consequently, whether there is a typological distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness has been unknown. To seek an answer to this question, it is necessary to examine typologically distant languages that share as well as differ in how morphologically complex words are formed and how morphological information is encoded in orthography. A study of Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition provides a good opportunity in this respect, because of the following similarities and differences between Chinese and English morphology.

To begin with, in both languages, compounding is an important way of word formation, and nominal compounds with the endocentric structure (i.e., Noun + Noun → Noun) are the dominant type (Fabb, 1998; Packard, 2000). On the other hand, English is comparatively rich in inflectional and derivational morphology (Plag, 2003), whereas Chinese has very few generally agreed-upon inflection- and derivation-like affixes, and compared to English affixes, their productivity is extremely low, resulting in only a small number of affixed words in Chinese (Li & Thompson, 1981). In addition to paucity and low productivity, affixes in Chinese are often low in functional salience in that a morpheme that serves as an affix often has multiple meanings, and it can sometimes function as a root or a bound root and be combined with other root morphemes to form compound words, too. Finally, a notable difference between Chinese and English morphology is how morphological information is encoded in orthography (Nagy et al., 2002; Toyoda & Scrimgeour, 2009). While in morphophonemic English, morphological information is orthographically encoded as a linear letter string that serves as a root or an affix, in logographic Chinese, that information is encoded at two levels (Shu & Anderson, 1997). In addition to a morphemic level at which a morpheme is typically encoded as a character, morphological information is also encoded at the sub-morphemic level, due to the unique feature of Chinese orthography. It is estimated that more than 80% of Chinese characters are compound characters, with a phonetic component giving a clue to the sound of a character and a semantic component (i.e., radical) giving a clue to the meaning of that character (DeFrancis, 1984; Taylor & Taylor, 1995). Named by Nagy et al. (2002) as graphomorphological awareness, which pertains to children’s awareness of morphemes specifically as they related to the graphic units of the writing system, radical awareness has been found to play an important role in children’s character knowledge development and literacy acquisition (Li et al., 2002; Shu & Anderson, 1997, 1999).

The influence of the foregoing similarities and differences between Chinese and English on morphological awareness transfer was partly addressed in Wang, Cheng, and Chen’s (2006) study on biliteracy acquisition among Chinese immigrant children in the USA. Using comparable tasks, Wang et al. measured children’s compound as well as derivational morphological awareness in both Chinese and English. Results revealed that children’s English compound awareness explained a unique proportion of variance in their Chinese reading ability, even after some related Chinese predictors were accounted for. However, such a predictive relation was not found for English derivational morphological awareness. A similar finding also surfaced in Pasquarella, Chen, Lam, Luo, & Ramirez (2011), which studied transfer of morphological awareness among Chinese–English bilingual children in Canada. Specifically, the study found that English compound awareness, as opposed to English derivational awareness, uniquely predicted Chinese vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension.

Overall, the findings of the two studies suggest that transfer facilitation can readily happen to awareness of compounding, a shared structure between Chinese and English, but not awareness of derivational morphology, which is more English-specific. It thus appears that the linguistic distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer as implied in the Transfer Facilitation Model was confirmed. However, because children’s radical awareness was not touched upon in the study, whether or not it, as a Chinese-specific facet of morphological awareness, can be transferred remains a question to be addressed. Interestingly, in the two studies, transfer of compound awareness happened from children’s L2 to L1 instead of the other way round (i.e., Chinese compound awareness did not uniquely predict English reading comprehension) that has been widely documented in previous biliteracy studies. It appears to suggest that in addition to linguistic distance, the relative proficiency of L1 and L2 might also have an impact on the pattern of morphological awareness transfer. Specifically, the children in the studies were studying in the mainstream schools in North America with English as the medium of instruction and it was likely that their L2 English proficiency was higher than that of their L1 or heritage language. To know how morphological structure and relative proficiency of L1 and L2 work in tandem in influencing the pattern of morphological awareness transfer, more studies that involve biliteracy in other learning contexts are warranted. Finally, there is a notable limitation in the studies in that the within-language morphological awareness variable was not measured (i.e., Chinese derivational awareness in Pasquarella et al., 2011) or controlled for (e.g., Chinese compound awareness in Wang et al., 2006) in examining the cross-linguistic relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability.

2 The present study

Focusing on young Chinese-speaking EFL readers, this study aimed to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension, and to further address whether there is any effect of linguistic distance and relative proficiency of L1 and L2 on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness in biliteracy. We chose to focus on two facets of morphological awareness: compound awareness, a shared facet between Chinese and English, and radical awareness, a facet that is uniquely tied to Chinese. Specifically, we aimed to address the following three research questions:

Does compound awareness contribute to reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 among young Chinese-speaking EFL readers?

Can L1 compound awareness be transferred and facilitate L2 reading comprehension, and vice versa?

Can Chinese radical awareness be transferred and facilitate English reading comprehension?

3 Method

3.1 Participants

The participants in this study were 45 fifth graders and 51 sixth graders who had formally learned English as a foreign language respectively for about three and four years in China. The fifth graders included 25 boys and 20 girls, with an average age of 10.99 years (SD = .41); the sixth graders included 23 boys and 28 girls, with an average age of 12.08 years (SD = .52). All of them spoke Mandarin Chinese as their home language. They came from two intact classes of a public elementary school located in the central town of a small county in Northeast China. Because the town is the political and commercial center of the county, residents of the town are generally better educated and financially better off than those living in more rural areas. However, most of them still belong to the working class.

3.2 Instruments

Altogether nine instruments were used for data collection, including a background questionnaire, a nonverbal intelligence test, five morphological awareness tasks, and two reading comprehension tests. Non-verbal intelligence was measured with Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM – Sets A, B and C with 36 items. Raven, Raven, & Court, 2000). Details of the morphological awareness and reading comprehension tasks are given in the following.

Compound structure tasks. These tasks measured the children’s understanding of the modifier-head structure of Chinese and English nominal compounds. Following Nagy et al. (2006), the English task asked the children to choose the better answer to a riddle from two given options, for example, Which is a better name for a bee that lives in the grass: a grass bee or a bee grass? Each riddle was paired with a version in which the modifier-head relationship between the two nouns was switched, for example, Which is a better name for grass where a lot of bees like to hide: bee grass or grass bee? The English task consisted of 20 items with 10 riddle-pairs, plus one practice item. The format of the Chinese task was similar. The only difference was that, following Wang et al. (2006), a few more complex riddles involving three-character compounds were used to increase the difficulty level of the task. For example, 用铜制盒子包装的糖果应该叫什么好呢: 铜糖盒, 铜盒糖, 糖盒铜, 还是盒铜糖? (Which is a better name for a candy that is packed in a box made out of bronze: bronze candy box, bronze box candy, candy box bronze, or box bronze candy?). In the end, the Chinese task comprised 20 items with 7 riddle-pairs of two-character compounds and 3 of three-character compounds, plus one practice item. All the root words in the English task and the root characters in the Chinese task were selected from the children’s textbooks and were familiar to them.

Morpheme discrimination tasks. Following Ku and Anderson (2003), two parallel compound awareness tasks were designed to measure the children’s understanding that a word part shared by different words may vary in meaning in these words, respectively for English and Chinese. In the English task, children were presented with groups of three words (e.g., classroom, bedroom, and mushroom); two words in each group were transparent compound words with the target word component having the same meaning (classroom and bedroom, in which room means a compartmentalized space in a building). The children needed to circle the word that did not belong (mushroom) to demonstrate their ability to differentiate meanings of the same morpheme in different words. An exemplary item of the Chinese task was: among the three words 水管 (water pipe), 保管 (to safeguard), and 吸管 (sucking-pipe or straw), the second word is the odd one because the meaning of the character 管means to take care or to guard rather than pipe as in the other two words. For both Chinese and English tasks, there were 10 test items, plus one practice item. All the words in the English and Chinese tasks came from the children’s textbooks and were judged by teachers as familiar to the children.

Radical awareness task. Constructed after Li, Anderson, Nagy, & Zhang (2002), this task asked the participants to select the component (i.e., radical) which provides semantic information of a compound character from a pool of four graphic components taken from the character. For example, the character 搬 (to move) was presented with four components 扌, 舟, 般, and 殳. Only 扌is the correct answer because it is the semantic radical that means hand or functions that have to be performed by hand, whereas 般 is the phonetic that provides a clue to the pronunciation of 搬. The other two choices, 舟 and 殳, are just graphic components of the phonetic. All the target characters had appeared in the children’s Chinese textbooks. There were 20 items in this test. A practice item was also provided.

Reading comprehension. Researcher-developed story comprehension tests were used to measure the children’s reading comprehension ability. For both Chinese and English tests, there were four stories followed by five multiple-choice questions that touched upon the children’s textual inference, main idea detection, and co-reference resolution skills. Each comprehension question was followed by four choices, and children were asked to select the best answer to each question. There were 20 comprehension questions for both languages. The mean length of the stories was about 125 words for English, and 593 characters for Chinese. For the English test, Chinese translations were provided for a few words (three to five) that appeared in each story and were judged by the English teachers as unfamiliar to most of the participants.

3.3 Data collection procedures

Data collection took place in the children’s regular Chinese and English classes near the end of their school year. In the Chinese classes, the background questionnaire and the nonverbal intelligence tests were administered first, followed by the Chinese morphological awareness tasks, and then the Chinese reading comprehension test. In the English classes, the English morphological awareness tasks were administered first, followed by the English reading comprehension test. Data collection was completed in about two weeks. Where appropriate, the children first worked on the practice item of each task, and started working on the test items, after all their questions, if any, had been addressed. To minimize potential confounding effect of word reading ability on morphological awareness performance, children were encouraged to ask their teachers about unsure pronunciations of words or characters that appeared in the morphological awareness tasks.

4 Results

4.1 Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations

Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of the children’s performance on the morphological awareness and reading comprehension tasks. Grade 6 children overall outperformed their Grade 5 counterparts. Independent sample t-tests revealed that the difference between the two grades was significant for Chinese Morpheme Discrimination, t(94) = 2.923, p < .01; Chinese Radical Awareness, t(94) = 2.163, p < .05; Chinese Reading Comprehension, t(94) = 3.064, p < .01; English Compound Structure, t(94) = 2.152, p < .05; and English Reading Comprehension, t(94) = 4.385, p < .001. There was no significant difference between the two grades for Chinese Compound Structure and English Morpheme Discrimination.

Table 1.

Means and standard deviations of all variables.

Variables	Reliability (Cronbach’s α)	Number of Items	Grade 5 (N = 45)	Grade 6 (N = 51)
Raven	.83	36	.84 (.11)	.87 (.06)
Chinese compound structure	.70	20	.74 (.10)	.77 (.10)
Chinese morpheme discrimination*	.86	10	.68 (.18)	.79 (.18)
Chinese radical awareness*	.93	20	.65 (.18)	.73 (.17)
Chinese reading comprehension*	.85	20	.68 (.14)	.78 (.17)
English compound structure*	.73	20	.64 (.10)	.70 (.14)
English morpheme discrimination	.81	10	.36 (.15)	.40 (.19)
English reading comprehension*	.73	20	.55 (.17)	.71 (.18)

Note. Variables marked with * show significant difference between the two grades based on independent sample t-tests. Means and standard deviations (in brackets) are presented in proportion of correct item choices.

Table 2 shows the bivariate correlations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese and English, with the two grades pooled. Overall, the correlations show close relationships between different morphological awareness measures and between morphological awareness and reading comprehension within each language. Chinese Compound Structure significantly correlated Chinese Morpheme Discrimination (r = .432, p < .001); both Chinese compound awareness measures also significantly correlated with Chinese Reading Comprehension, r = .343, p < .001 and r = .505, p < .001, respectively. Chinese Radical Awareness significantly correlated with Chinese Morpheme Discrimination (r = .320, p < .001) as well as Chinese Reading Comprehension (r = .311, p < .05), but not Chinese Compound Structure (r = .171). Within English language, measures of compound awareness were significantly correlated (r = .266, p < .01), and both also significantly correlated with English reading comprehension, r = .276, p < .01 and r = .321, p < .001 respectively for Compound Structure and Morpheme Discrimination.

Table 2.

Bivariate correlations between grade, nonverbal intelligence, and Chinese and English variables.

		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1	Grade	–
2	Non-verbal intelligence	.166	–
3	Chinese compound structure	.127	.257*	–
4	Chinese morpheme discrimination	.289**	.273**	.432***	–
5	Chinese radical awareness	.218*	.134	.171	.320***	–
6	Chinese reading comprehension	.301**	.268**	.343***	.505***	.311**	–
7	English compound structure	.217*	.136	.154	.256*	.075	.127	–
8	English morpheme discrimination	.141	.009	.199	.346***	.321***	.302**	.266**	–
9	English reading comprehension	.412***	.253*	.330***	.484***	.144	.412***	.276**	.321***	–

p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

Cross-linguistically, some correlations between Chinese and English morphological awareness measures showed significance. Chinese Morpheme Discrimination correlated significantly with English Compound Structure (r = .256, p < .05) as well as English Morpheme Discrimination (r = .346, p < .001); Chinese Radical Awareness correlated with English Morpheme Discrimination (r = .321, p < .001), but not English Compound Structure (r = .075). Both measures of Chinese compound awareness, but not Chinese Radical Awareness, correlated significantly with English Reading Comprehension, r = .330, p < .001 and r = .484, p < .001 respectively for English Compound Structure and English Morpheme Discrimination. Finally, Table 2 also shows that English Morpheme Discrimination and English Reading Comprehension significantly correlated with Chinese Reading Comprehension, r = .302, p < .01 and r = .412, p < .001 respectively.

The foregoing correlations seem to suggest that there was a functional relationship between compound awareness and reading comprehension both intra- and inter-lingually in L1 Chinese and L2 English, and that orthography-specific L1 morphological awareness (i.e., Chinese radical awareness) did not play a functional role in L2 reading comprehension. This type of evidence is, of course, preliminary. For example, the significant correlations between Chinese compound awareness measures and English reading comprehension might be due to the close relationship between Chinese and English compound awareness on one hand, and that between English compound awareness and English reading comprehension on the other hand. To identify the unique cross-linguistic relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, controlling for related within-language variables and other related variables is essential. To this end, hierarchical regression analyses were performed with Chinese and English reading comprehension as the respective criterion variable and with predicting variables entered step-wise into the regression equation.

4.2 Hierarchical regression analysis predicting English reading comprehension

In this section, we examine the unique contribution of English as well as Chinese morphological awareness to English reading comprehension. Because of the relatively small number of children in each grade, following the previous practice (e.g., Pasquarella et al., 2011; Ramirez et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2006), we pooled the data to perform the multiple regression analysis but used grade as a covariate to control for the influence of children’s formal learning experience on reading performance. Children’s non-verbal intelligence was also controlled for. As shown in Table 3, over and above grade and non-verbal intelligence, English compound awareness, with the two measures entered into the regression equation in a block, uniquely predicted English reading comprehension and explained about 8.4% of its variance (ΔF = 5.391, p < .01). To examine whether there was cross-linguistic transfer of L1 morphological awareness in facilitating L2 reading comprehension, we entered Chinese radical awareness after English compound awareness was already in the regression equation. As shown in Table 3 (Model 1), over and above grade, non-verbal intelligence, and English compound awareness, radical awareness failed to significantly predict English reading comprehension because of its weak and non-significant correlation with English reading comprehension. Chinese compound awareness, entered after Chinese radical awareness, was significantly predictive of English reading comprehension and explained additional 8.7% of its variance (ΔF = 6.114, p < .01). To control for potential comprehension-level cross-linguistic relationship, we did another set of hierarchical regression analysis with Chinese reading comprehension entered before Chinese compound awareness and radical awareness. Overall, the pattern remained the same. As shown in Table 3 (Model 2), Chinese reading comprehension uniquely explained about 4% of the variance in English reading comprehension (ΔF = 5.411, p < .05). The contribution of radical awareness to English reading comprehension showed little difference. Entered after Chinese reading comprehension and Chinese radical awareness, Chinese compound awareness was still significantly predictive of English reading comprehension, although its contribution was reduced, and this time, it explained about 5.4% additional variance of English reading comprehension (ΔF = 3.841, p < .05).

Table 3.

Hierarchical regression analysis predicting English reading comprehension.

Model 1					Model 2
Step	Predictors	R ²	ΔR²	ΔF	Step	Predictors	R ²	ΔR²	ΔF
1	Grade	.170	.170	19.232***	1	Grade	.170	.170	19.232***
2	Non-verbal intelligence	.205	.035	4.094*	2	Non-verbal intelligence	.205	.035	4.094*
3	English compound structure	.289	.084	5.391**	3	English compound structure	.289	.084	5.391**
	English morpheme discrimination					English morpheme discrimination
4	Chinese radical awareness	.291	.002	.210	4	Chinese reading comprehension	.329	.040	5.411*
5	Chinese compound structure	.377	.087	6.114**	5	Chinese radical awareness	.335	.006	.794
	Chinese morpheme discrimination				6	Chinese compound structure	.389	.054	3.841*
						Chinese morpheme discrimination

p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

4.3 Hierarchical regression analysis predicting Chinese reading comprehension

To examine the relationship between compound awareness and reading comprehension within Chinese and whether compound awareness, as an L1/L2-shared facet of morphological awareness, could also be transferred from L2 English to facilitate L1 Chinese reading comprehension, another hierarchical regression analysis with Chinese reading comprehension as the criterion variable was performed. Similar to the practice in the previous section, we first entered grade and non-verbal intelligence into the regression equation. As shown in Table 4, both variables explained a significant proportion of variance in Chinese reading comprehension. Over and above age and non-verbal intelligence, Chinese compound awareness, with the two measures entered in a block, explained an additional 17% variance of Chinese reading comprehension (ΔF = 11.244, p < .001). Beyond the contribution of Chinese compound awareness, English compound awareness only explained a very minor proportion of variance in Chinese reading comprehension, and the unique contribution did not achieve significance, whether Chinese radical awareness and English reading comprehension were in the model (Model 1; ΔF = .737; 1.1% of the variance explained) or not (Model 2; ΔF = 1.454; 2.2% of the variance explained).

Table 4.

Hierarchical regression analysis predicting Chinese reading comprehension.

Model 1					Model 2
Step	Predictors	R ²	ΔR²	ΔF	Step	Predictors	R ²	ΔR²	ΔF
1	Grade	.091	.091	9.390**	1	Grade	.091	.091	9.390**
2	Non-verbal intelligence	.140	.049	5.289*	2	Non-verbal intelligence	.140	.049	5.289*
3	Chinese compound structure	.310	.170	11.244***	3	Chinese compound structure	.310	.170	11.244***
	Chinese morpheme discrimination					Chinese morpheme discrimination
4	Chinese radical awareness	.327	.016	2.177	4	English compound structure	.332	.022	1.454
5	English reading comprehension	.343	.016	2.184		English morpheme discrimination
6	English compound structure	.354	.011	.737
	English morpheme discrimination

p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

5 Discussion

The major objective of this study was to examine the intra- and inter-lingual relationships between morphological awareness and reading comprehension among Chinese-speaking children learning English as a Foreign Language, and possible typological distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness. To answer our first research question, we found that children’s compound awareness significantly predicted reading comprehension in both L1 and L2. The significant intra-lingual relationship between compound awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese and English does not seem to be a surprise, given that compounding is an important way of word formation in both languages. Because awareness of compound structure and the ability to discriminate morpheme meanings are necessitated for making inferences of unknown compound words, such lexical inference process or “on the spot vocabulary learning” while reading (Nagy, 2007, p. 64), as mentioned earlier, could help learners resolve their vocabulary gaps in reading and lead to better comprehension. In addition, compound awareness may also influence fluency of compound word reading, which in turn has an impact on reading comprehension. The finding of the present study is also consistent with those of previous research that has focused primarily on literacy acquisition in monolingual Chinese- and English-speaking children (Chen et al., 2009; Ku & Anderson, 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2007). McBride-Chang et al. (2007), for example, found that Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking third graders’ awareness of Chinese compound structure significantly predicted their Chinese reading comprehension, after controlling for age difference and phonological processing skills. The significant contribution of compound awareness to English L2 reading appears to suggest that compound awareness is one of the universally important skills that support English reading comprehension, whether English is learned as a first language or a second/foreign language (Geva & Wang, 2001).

The present study also showed close inter-lingual relationships between compound awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese and English. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that after accounting for the effect of English compound awareness and other related variables (e.g., Chinese reading comprehension), Chinese compound awareness still explained a unique amount of variance in children’s English reading comprehension, suggesting a facilitation effect of L1 morphological awareness transfer of on L2 reading. This finding is aligned with recent theories of metalinguistic awareness transfer in L2 reading and biliteracy acquisition (Durgunoglu, 1997; Genesee et al., 2006; Koda, 2005, 2008). It also corroborates previous studies that have examined a similar topic (e.g., Deacon et al., 2007; Ramirez et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2006). On the other hand, this type of transfer facilitation effect was not found for Chinese radical awareness. In this study, we did not find a significant correlation between radical awareness and English reading comprehension, and naturally, radical awareness accounted only for a very minor and non-significant proportion of variance in English reading comprehension, particularly after English compound awareness and other related variables were controlled for. Previously, Wang et al. (2006) and Pasquarella et al. (2011) observed transfer of compound awareness in Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition among Chinese immigrants in North America, but not derivational morphological awareness, which pertains to a more English-specific skill. The present study complements that finding. In the present study, the radical awareness task measured a facet of morphological awareness that is closely tied to Chinese orthography and involves a sub-morphemic level of analysis. Because radical awareness is a Chinese-specific insight, the lack of its cross-linguistic relationship to English reading comprehension found in the present study seems to be reasonable. This finding, in conjunction with the finding of a significant effect of Chinese compound awareness on English reading comprehension, mentioned earlier, thus lends clear support to the hypothesis of Koda’s (2005, 2008) Transfer Facilitation Model, which predicts that cross-linguistic transfer of metalinguistic awareness is governed by the linguistic distance between focal languages. In other words, transfer facilitation should readily happen to facets of metalinguistic awareness that are shared between the two languages of bilingual children, while facets that are more language/script-specific should not be as transfer-ready as shared facets.

Finally, this study found that English compound awareness did not stand as a significant predictor of Chinese reading comprehension, suggesting that there was no or very limited transfer of compound awareness from L2 to L1. At first sight, this finding seems to contradict those of a few previous studies that have also examined directionality of morphological awareness transfer in biliteracy acquisition. For example, Wang et al. (2006) and Pasquarella et al. (2011) found that Chinese–English children transferred their L2 English compound awareness to their L1 Chinese reading comprehension. Deacon et al. (2007) found bi-directional transfer of morphological awareness in English–French biliteracy acquisition. However, a close look at the learning contexts and the programs in which children were involved may help explain the discrepancy of findings derived from those previous studies and the present study. To illustrate, in Wang et al. (2006) and Pasquarella et al. (2011), the participants were bilingual immigrant children studying in the mainstream classrooms in North America. L1 Chinese was the non-societal language, and L2 English was the societal language and the medium of instruction in school. Consequently, English became the stronger language of this group of children, and English literacy was their primary literacy. On the contrary, Chinese language and literacy only serve ancillary purposes. It is, therefore, not a surprise to find morphological awareness transfer from L2 English to L1 Chinese, rather than the other way around. In Deacon et al. (2007), the English-speaking children were involved in a French-immersion program. They tended to have more balanced competencies in English and French, and expectedly, bi-directional transfer of morphological awareness was found among them. In clear contrast to the foregoing two contexts of biliteracy acquisition, in the present study, the participants were living in a monolingual Chinese community in China, and Chinese was their home and dominant language. While the children had learned English as a foreign language for about three or four years, that learning was clearly restricted to the classroom setting. The children’s exposure to English was very limited, in spoken as well as written forms. Consequently, the transfer of compound awareness was found only from L1 Chinese to L2 English, rather than the other way around or being bi-directional. Overall, the findings also appear to support Cummins’s Linguistic Threshold Hypothesis (Cummins, 1991, 2012), which highlights proficiency as an important factor that moderates the appearance of cross-linguistic transfer in bilingual and biliteracy acquisition.

A few limitations of the present study are to be noted. The first one is that vocabulary knowledge and word-level reading skills were not measured and subsequently considered in the hierarchical regression analyses. Because our morphological awareness measures were administered in print, they involved children’s reading of the target words. Subsequently, children’s morphological awareness performance might have been confounded by their knowledge of the target words and the ability to read these words. In the present study, to minimize effect of such potential confounding, all the words/characters included in the morphological awareness tasks were selected from the children’s textbooks, and we ensured that the words were familiar to fifth as well as sixth graders after consulting the Chinese and English teachers of the participating children. In addition, teachers were around to help the children while the tasks were being administered, and the children were encouraged to ask their teachers about pronunciations of words in the morphological awareness tasks. All these arrangements should have helped reduce potential impact of vocabulary knowledge and word reading ability on the children’s performance on the morphological awareness tasks. Therefore, the results of the present study, overall, provide a reliable relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension within and across languages. That said, to develop a more robust model of cross-linguistic relationship between L1/L2-shared as well as specific facets of morphological awareness and reading comprehension in typological diverse languages, it might still be favorable to measure L1 and L2 vocabulary knowledge and word reading skills, and include these variables in the model.

Given the complex relationship between reading comprehension and these related variables, particularly in the case of L2 reading or biliteracy acquisition, future studies might consider using the Structural Equation Modeling method, if a very large sample of L2 learners or bilingual children is available, to model the direct and/or indirect relations between morphological awareness in one language and reading ability in another language, with all related variables considered in the model. Nagy et al. (2006) has provided a good example with the study of monolingual English reading, and Gottardo and Mueller (2009) with the study of transfer of phonological awareness. To the best of our knowledge, very few efforts have been taken to incorporate this methodological paradigm into empirical studies of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness in L2 reading or biliteracy acquisition (see Pasquarella et al., 2011 for an exception). A recent study (Zhang et al., 2010) also adopted an experimental paradigm to explore transfer of morphological awareness. Either conventional regression analysis or SEM is correlation/covariance-based. To provide causal evidence, experimental research should be desired that incorporates training in an aspect of morphological awareness in one language and investigates if such training would, or would not, lead to enhanced reading development in the other language.

Finally, the present study adopted only one measure of Chinese radical awareness, which might have weakened the cross-linguistic effect of radical awareness. It is desirable that future research include multiple measures of radical awareness to better represent the construct so that a robust testing could be achieved of linguistic distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness.

6 Conclusion

This study examined contribution of morphological awareness to Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition, focusing on young EFL readers in China. It was found that Chinese compound awareness explained a unique amount of variance in English reading comprehension, after English compound awareness and Chinese reading comprehension were controlled for, but not vice versa. In addition, Chinese radical awareness did not significantly predict English reading comprehension. These findings support that there is a facilitation effect of compound awareness, which is a shared facet of morphological awareness between Chinese and English, in Chinese–English biliteracy acquisition, but no such effect of radical awareness, which is Chinese-specific. Overall, this study confirmed that morphological awareness transfer in biliteracy acquisition is governed by the linguistic distance between the focal languages, and suggested that learning context also has an influence on morphological awareness transfer.

Footnotes

Authors biographies

Dongbo Zhang is a research scientist at the Center for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include bilingual children’s literacy acquisition and second-language acquisition.

Keiko Koda is Professor of Second-Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include second-language reading and biliteracy acquisition. Her recent publications include Insights into Second Language Reading (2005) and Learning to Read across Languages (co-edited with A. Zehler, 2008).

Xiaoxi Sun is a research fellow at the Singapore Center for Chinese Language, Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests are interlanguage pragmatics and second-language fluency development.

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