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Morphological Awareness and Reading Development in Bilingual English-Chinese Children in Singapore

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Quadrilingual Education in Singapore

Part of the book series: Education Innovation Series ((EDIN))

Abstract

Addressing two aspects of morphological awareness – derivational and compound – this study investigates the relationships between morphological awareness and vocabulary and reading comprehension in English-Chinese bilingual primary 3 children in Singapore (N = 76). Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were administered to examine the children’s morphological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The results show that morphological awareness is highly related to vocabulary and reading comprehension, with higher correlations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension than between morphological awareness and vocabulary. This indicates that morphological awareness may have direct influence on reading comprehension beyond the mediating effect of vocabulary. Furthermore, the results indicate that children displayed more compound than derivational morphological awareness for Chinese due to the dominance of compound morphology in Chinese. However, the children also displayed similar levels of derivational and compound morphological awareness for English despite far more derivatives than compounds in English. The robust crosslinguistic correlations suggest that Chinese compound morphological knowledge plays a facilitating role not only in learning English compounds but also in learning transparently derived words that do not involve phonological or orthographic shifts.

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Acknowledgments

This chapter refers to data from the research project “Metalinguistic Knowledge and Bilingual Academic Performance” (OER35/09XLC), funded by the Education Research Funding Programme, National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of the NIE. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the participating schools, teachers, and students.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. English Language and Literature, National Institute of Education, Singapore, Singapore

    Baoqi Sun

  2. Institute of Education, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen

Authors
  1. Baoqi Sun
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  2. Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Baoqi Sun .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, National Institute of Education, Singapore

    Rita Elaine Silver

  2. Crandall University, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

    Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Language Background Questionnaire

Please fill in the blanks and tick “✓” at the “ ⃞ ” where necessary

1. Name __________________

2. Class ___________________

3. Date of birth: \( \begin{array}{l}\begin{array}{ccc}\underset{\_}{\kern1.36em }/& \underset{\_}{\kern1.36em }/& \underset{\_}{\kern1.36em }\end{array}\hfill \\ {}\left(\mathrm{day}/\mathrm{month}/\mathrm{year}\right)\hfill \end{array} \)

4. ⃞ Boy ⃞ Girl

5. Please tick “✓”where necessary

 

English

English and Mandarin

Mandarin

Mandarin and/or Chinese dialect

Malay

Tamil

Others

Language used between parents

       

Language used from parents to you

       

Language used from you to parents

       

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Sun, B., Curdt-Christiansen, X.L. (2016). Morphological Awareness and Reading Development in Bilingual English-Chinese Children in Singapore. In: Elaine Silver, R., Bokhorst-Heng, W. (eds) Quadrilingual Education in Singapore. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-287-965-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-287-967-7

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