About the Project:

Morphological awareness (MA) is the awareness and ability to identify and manipulate the smallest unit of meaning within a word, which plays an important role in word reading and reading comprehension. This study will examine the effects of teaching English morphological awareness skills on English and Chinese reading among Chinese students learning English as a second language in Hong Kong.

Given the positive relationship between morphological decoding/analysis and morphological structure awareness including inflection, derivation and compounding, we expect that the interventions of morphological decoding/analysis would also enhance morphological structure awareness. 

There are two research questions put forward in this study: (1) What are the immediate and sustained effects of Morphological Decoding Intervention (MDI) and Morphological Analysis Intervention (MAI) in English on reading-related skills? (2) Is MAI able to enhance Chinese reading, thereby demonstrating cross-language transfer from English MA to Chinese reading?

In this matched randomized controlled trial, a total of 150 cantonese-speaking Primary 4 students will be divided into three groups: a decoding group which analyzed morphemes phonologically, an analysis group which analyzed morphemes semantically, and a control group which learned English without any emphasis on morphological awareness skills. Each intervention programme, delivered by trained-experimenter, will last for 12 weeks with two 45-minute sessions in each week. Students were tested on various English and Chinese competency measures before, immediately after, and a few months after the intervention period to examine the impacts of different treatments on students’ morphological awareness and reading abilities. We will also investigate the mediating effects of compounding and vocabulary on the intervention effects between treatment groups