Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension: A Cross-linguistic Study

This study investigated the association between cross-language morphological awareness and reading comprehension among the second language (English) adult learners who speak Sinhala as a first language. Measures of morphological awareness and reading comprehension (sentence-level and passage-level) in both languages were administered to appraise learners’ morphological awareness and reading comprehension. The results of the regression analyses indicated that although Sinhala morphological awareness was associated with sentence-level English reading comprehension, it did not associate with passage-level English reading comprehension. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that English morphological awareness did not associate with sentence-level Sinhala reading comprehension. The results suggested that cross-language associations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension differ depending on the language background and level of reading comprehension: passage-level or sentence-level comprehension.