The effect of morphological awareness on reading comprehension performance of field-dependent and independent Iranian EFL learners

One of the contributors to word reading and reading comprehension skill is identifying of how words broken down into smaller elements of meaning such as roots, prefixes and suffixes. According to some researches morphological awareness facilitate decoding of the words and it enhances word knowledge and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 2010; Nagy et al., 2014). This study deals with the issue of the effect of morphological awareness on reading comprehension performance among two cognitive styles of field-dependent and independent Iranian EFL learners. The study was conducted on sixty male and female learners from one of Tehran English institute. In order to classify the participants in groups of field-dependent and field-independent learners, Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was administered then morphological awareness treatment was given to the experimental group which was included both field- dependent and field-independent learners. Participants in the control group were exposed to the conventional method of institution. A sample of Preliminary English Test (PET) extracted from Preliminary English Test 5 of Cambridge ESOL Examinations published by Cambridge University Press (2008) and used in this study. To this end, only the reading comprehension section of the test was used to examine the effect of morphological awareness treatment on reading comprehension performance. To answer the first and second research questions that seeking whether morphological awareness has any significant impact on the reading comprehension performance of Iranian field-dependent and field-independent EFL learners, one-way ANCOVA analysis was used. The result of analysis for the collected data indicated a significant relationship between the field independent learners on reading comprehension performance and morphological awareness. This finding implicates the importance of facilitating the student’s morphological awareness in English reading skill for EFL learners in Iran. It is suggested that teaching morphological awareness should be included more frequently in instruction in order to decoding and guessing the meaning of unknown words and better reading comprehension. It may also help learner’s deep retention of vocabulary.

Morphological awareness. Reading comprehension, Field dependent, Field independent