The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Arabic-speaking second graders
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The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Arabic‑speaking second graders Vered Vaknin‑Nusbaum1,2 · Elinor Saiegh‑Haddad3
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We examined the longitudinal contribution of awareness of inflections and derivations to reading comprehension in Arabic, a morphologically rich language, among 734 second graders. Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, word decoding and reading comprehension tasks were delivered at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Results indicated that readers improved in morphological awareness and reading comprehension over the course of the year. More importantly, in general, morphological awareness at the beginning of the year predicted reading comprehension at the end of the year. Moreover, inflectional awareness at the beginning of the year predicted reading comprehension at the end of the year among readers with low levels of morphological awareness, whereas both inflectional and derivational awareness predicted reading comprehension in high morphological awareness readers, beyond the contribution of word decoding. The results highlight the importance of testing awareness of inflections and derivations separately, and the differential role of inflectional and derivational awareness to Arabic reading comprehension in young readers with different levels of morphological awareness. Keywords Arabic · Derivational awareness · Inflectional awareness · Morphological awareness · Reading comprehension
Introduction Writing systems reflect the cognitive processes that enable readers to extract meaning from written text. The cognitive system is a “correlation-seeking device”, i.e., a system that uses all available properties of language to support the reading process. * Vered Vaknin‑Nusbaum [email protected] 1
Department of Education, Western Galilee College, P.O.B. 2125, 24121 Akko, Israel
2
The Center for The Study of Society, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
3
Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
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V. Vaknin‑Nusbaum, E. Saiegh‑Haddad
Morphological structure, for example, is mirrored in the orthographic structure of the Semitic word, allowing readers to use morphology to decode and comprehend text (Frost, 2012). Awareness of morphemes and the ability to manipulate them to build up or decompose words (morphological awareness) may be used in decoding new forms that appear in text and in arriving at their meaning. This process is more readily used when words are morphologically transparent (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Taha & Saiegh-Haddad, 2016), and is observed as early as the first and the second grades (Saiegh-Haddad, 2013; Saiegh-Haddad & Taha, 2017; Taha & Saiegh-Haddad, 2017; Vaknin-Nusbaum, Sarid, Raveh & Nevo, 2016; Vaknin-Nusbaum, 2018). Therefore, while investigating the reading process, one should consider the unique features of the language and the orthography (Frost, 2012; Share, 2008), as these may inform the way the r
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