The Strategic Use of Morphological Information in Children Struggling with Reading Comprehension

This correlational study profiles morphosyntactic awareness in children struggling with reading comprehension in grades 5 to 7. The research is underpinned by two theoretical frameworks of reading and word identification. According to the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. The Lexical Quality Hypothesis proposes that words stored in long term memory vary in the degree to which semantic, orthographic and phonological features are interlocked in long term memory.Students completed measures of intelligence, reading and morphosyntactic awareness which were both oral and written to investigate a) the students’ strategic use of morphemes in sentence-based tasks, b) whether difficulties with oral versus written tasks were more predictive of reading comprehension ability, and c) whether measures of morphosyntactic awareness could be differentiated on the basis of their usefulness in predicting comprehension ability.Results showed that while word identification was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension, oral measures of morphosyntactic awareness were useful in a model of prediction. Results are examined in light of both theoretical frameworks. Difficulties for this sample of poor comprehenders likely originate in struggles with word identification. The finding that oral measures of morphosyntactic measures predict comprehension for poor and typical comprehenders demonstrates the importance of considering sensitivity to morphologically complex words in oral language in late elementary school, a period of dramatic growth in knowledge of morphologically derived word forms.