The relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese reading comprehension in the 3rd and 4th grade students in Taiwan

The study aims to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese reading comprehension. Participants were composed of 277 the 3rd- and 4th- grade students from the primary schools in the northern Taiwan. All the participants were administrated with the Chinese morphological awareness, including the assessment of morpheme discrimination, semantic radical awareness, morpheme interpretation, morpheme construction, and construction rule awareness. The data was analyzed by the Pearson's correlation and multiple regression to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The major findings indicate that morphological awareness is not only significantly correlated with reading comprehension, but also makes significant unique contribution to reading comprehension even after controlling intelligence and vocabulary. There are three components of morphological awareness to significantly predict reading comprehension: morpheme interpretation, morpheme construction, and semantic radical awareness. The most powerful predictor is morpheme interpretation. While controlling IQ or vocabulary to delete the co-variation of these variables, the contribution of morphological awareness to the reading comprehension slightly varies. According to the findings, recommendations for future studies and pedagogy are made.