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Morphological awareness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: within and cross-language effects on word reading

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Abstract

This study investigated within and cross-language effects of morphological awareness on word reading among Spanish-speaking children who were English Language Learners. Participants were 97 Spanish-speaking children in grade 4 and grade 7. Morphological awareness in Spanish and in English was evaluated with two measures of derivational morphology. The results showed that Spanish morphological awareness contributed unique variance to Spanish word reading after controlling for other reading related variables. English morphological awareness also explained unique variance in English word reading. Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness was observed from Spanish to English, but not from English to Spanish. These results suggest that morphological awareness is important for word reading in Spanish, a shallow orthography with a complex morphological system. They also suggest that morphological awareness developed in children’s L1 is associated with word reading in English, their L2.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding for this research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through a graduate grant to the first author and a standard grant to the second author.

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  1. Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, 9-221, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada

    Gloria Ramirez, Xi Chen, Esther Geva & Heidi Kiefer

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  1. Gloria Ramirez
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Correspondence to Xi Chen.

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Ramirez, G., Chen, X., Geva, E. et al. Morphological awareness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: within and cross-language effects on word reading. Read Writ 23, 337–358 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9203-9

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