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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 417–438 | Cite as

The developmental relationship between bilingual morphological awareness and reading for Chinese EFL adult learners: a longitudinal study

  • Jin Xue
  • Xiaoming Jiang
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The present research aimed to explore the developmental relationship between bilingual morphological awareness and reading for Chinese natives learning English as a foreign language (EFL learners). Pre- and post-tests were conducted with in an interval of 9 months. Morphological and reading measures in Chinese and English were administered to 139 participants. The results confirmed the intra-language correlations between morphological awareness and reading. The study also demonstrated that the contribution of English derivational awareness to English reading was higher than that of English compound awareness. Chinese compound morphology was found to explain a greater amount of variance of English reading in posttest than pretest. The results indicate the relationship between bilingual reading and morphological awareness was subjected to the similarities between the two languages in terms of morphological features as well as language proficiency.

Keywords

Chinese–English bilinguals Morphological awareness Development 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from Social Science Foundation of Beijing, China (14WYC042) and Social Science Foundation of China (16BYY077) to the first author. The authors appreciate Prof. Xi Chen in the OISE, University of Toronto for her support in the development of measures and her insightful observations and suggestions on this paper. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Foreign StudiesUniversity of Science and Technology BeijingBeijingChina
  2. 2.School of English Language, Literature and Culture and Centre for Language and CognitionBeijing International Studies UniversityBeijingChina
  3. 3.Beijing New Talent AcademyBeijingChina

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