In this article they look at how morphological awareness effects biliteracy. They did a study on French and English speakers and one of the interesting results from the study was that Morphological awareness in English seemed to play a greater role in reading both in and across languages, while in French it seemed to play a greater role in reading later on. The experimenters admit that in the future they have to look at derivational morphemes, because in their study they only included inflectional morphemes. This could perhaps effect the results. They also say that the results could have been effected because the child learns english at home, while they learn french at school, so perhaps earlier on they are exposed to more english literacy activities and then later on they are exposed to more french.
This article examined the relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability in bilinguals. The subjects were all native English speakers who attend a French immersion school. Their results showed effects cross-linguistically that, for the most part, mirrored the effects they found within-language. They showed that awareness of English morphology early on had a significant impact on literacy later on, but that measures of morphological awareness taken later on had weaker and weaker effects on literacy. On the other hand French morphological awareness in Grade 1 had little effect on reading abilities beyond that grade, but the effect of morphological awareness became stronger over time. It is interesting that there is this relationship between the languages where as one grows stronger the other rows weaker and vice versa. One reason they suggested for this was the fact that these children had been speaking English in the home for the years before starting school, so they naturally rely more on English morphological awareness, but the more time they spend in school the more they are able to rely on French morphological awareness. However, one weakness they pointed out is that “the reliabilities of the Grade 1 French and Grade 3 English morphological awareness tasks were low. This is an important limitation of the present study; low reliabilities set an upper limit on the discovery of statistical relationships between variables. This is one possible reason for the inconsistent relationships between Grade 1 French and Grade 3 English morphological awareness and reading, because these are the points at which reliability is low.” So though I think it is clear from their results that morphological awareness does play a role in developing literacy and that there are some cross-linguistic effects for bilinguals, perhaps the exact relationship they showed here is nor entirely robust.
It was interesting to me that the morphological awareness of the language has something to do with the reading in different language. It was also interesting that the each morphological awareness work differently (“Early English morphological awareness made a substantial contribution to reading in English and French, whereas later French morphological awareness contributed to reading in both languages”). I am curious that how the result changes if these two languages are different (eg. English and Spanish / Japanese and Chinese).
This article examined whether morphological awareness contributes to reading development across languages, and not just for monolinguals. The study looked specifically at children who were biliterate English-French, following them from Grade 1 to Grade 3. All children came from English speaking homes, but were involved in French immersion classes beginning in either kindergarten or Grade 1. The results of the study found that early morphological awareness of English contributed to reading in French. Later morphological awareness of French impacted the reading of English. I wonder if the results would have been different if the immersion language had been a tonal language rather than French.
“Children may require some minimal amount of linguistic
proficiency to understand the individual sentences within the analogy
as well as to conduct morphological analysis within a language…”
So in order to read French, you must first know some French? Color me surprised! One wonders if the researchers knew this from the outset and couldn’t incorporate it into the study, or they smacked their foreheads in frustration once they realized.
Aside from that, I’m confused on what I assume is statistics jargon. What, for example, is a reliability measure for a task?
I agree that morphological awareness is a language-specific skill and therefore should be adapted for a single language and reading within a single language that do not cross over from one language to another as every language has it’s specific morphological. Cross linguistic contribution of morphological awareness in reading cause confusion for readers! It is very important here that second-language learners build their skills and knowledge in determining the transfer relationship. I wonder how past tense tasks in English and French have similar cognitive demands, specifically past and present actions and situations?! How about the irregular verbs in English!
This article examines the role of morphological awareness—as assessed with a past tense analogy task—in dual-language reading development in French immersion children. There is already evidence of links between morphological awareness and monolingual literacy and this study suggests that there is also evidence for transfer of morphological awareness between languages aiding literacy. These findings interest me in how they are related to a 5th grade student I am currently observing for a class in English as a second language education. She speaks Spanish as her first language and English as her second. While her language skills are apparently stronger (or at least equal to) her English speaking skills, she professes to only be able to read in English and has great difficulty reading in Spanish. If there is a great deal of crosslinguistic morphological transfer to reading, then her English literacy education should also contribute to her Spanish literacy. I’m wondering if there is less transfer if there has been no formal literacy instruction in one of the target languages, as such is the case for this particular student. If she were taught to read and write in Spanish now would there be a greater morphological transfer than she currently has access to in trying to read Spanish text?
Morphological awareness is something that I never really thought of in regard of achieving literacy in children. I thought it’s interesting that early measures of English morphological awareness affected both English and French reading, early measures of French only related to French reading. After reading this article, I thought of English speaking children with reading disabilities and dyslexia. I wondered if there are as many cases of reading disabilities and/or spelling difficulties in French speaking children.
This study proved cross linguistic transfer of morphological awareness that contributed to reading in French and English in a dual program. To add to Elena’s comment about her example of a 5th grade student, I think if this student is not in a dual program that has her L1 as the other language it would be difficult for any child that is not comparing both languages constantly to transfer the morphological awareness from one language to the other.
Traditionally, most people would expect students of French – a highly inflected language – to have an increased morphological awareness in the language than in English. The study appears to prove that there is cross-linguistic carry-over of skills relating to the formation of the past tense. To the extent that this test really is a measure of morphological awareness, it appears that longitudinal data regarding French showed that immersion students gained morphological awareness after increased proficiency in reading. This corroborates the notion that orthographic cues are instrumental in structuring learners’ conception of grammatical functions of morphemes. While it is clear that reading ability will influence morphological awareness, I cannot see how the inverse would be true, the two concepts being linked as they are. Besides, the author readily admits that the key limitation to the study is that all measures were conducted on the assumption the past tense transformations in a sentence analogy task were an adequate measure of morphological awareness.
In “Crossover: The Role of Morphological Awareness in French Immersion Children’s Readingâ€, researchers tested morphological awareness to find out whether morphological awareness is in biliterate children and if morphological awareness crossed over between languages. They researched these questions by looking at the morphological awareness of the regular English past tense and the passé composé. The researchers found morphological awareness in biliterate children and some crossover effects. However, the researchers could not parse out “the changing levels of language and literacy proficiency and the nature of the items in the morphological awareness task†in order to analyze the results. But, the researchers acknowledge several shortcomings including not taking syntax into account or testing orthographic knowledge. The researcher also made the point that they should test derivational rather than inflectional morphology. I did not completely understand why they thought this. The difference between derivational morphology and inflectional morphology is not definite, but is on a continuum.
On another note, the authors stated, “Studying a developing bilingual sample allowed us to measure abilities in each language within each participant. This provided the most stringent control for a number of potentially confounding factors such as social economic statusâ€(Deacon et al 735). I was wondering if the researchers thought this meant they were taking into account that children with a higher social economic status have more access and exposure to reading material. If this is the case, I personally think they should have found out the child’s exposure to literature outside the classroom rather than making assumptions about socio-economic status. I was also wondered about how morphological awareness is in languages with non-concatenated morphology.
In this article they look at how morphological awareness effects biliteracy. They did a study on French and English speakers and one of the interesting results from the study was that Morphological awareness in English seemed to play a greater role in reading both in and across languages, while in French it seemed to play a greater role in reading later on. The experimenters admit that in the future they have to look at derivational morphemes, because in their study they only included inflectional morphemes. This could perhaps effect the results. They also say that the results could have been effected because the child learns english at home, while they learn french at school, so perhaps earlier on they are exposed to more english literacy activities and then later on they are exposed to more french.
This article examined the relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability in bilinguals. The subjects were all native English speakers who attend a French immersion school. Their results showed effects cross-linguistically that, for the most part, mirrored the effects they found within-language. They showed that awareness of English morphology early on had a significant impact on literacy later on, but that measures of morphological awareness taken later on had weaker and weaker effects on literacy. On the other hand French morphological awareness in Grade 1 had little effect on reading abilities beyond that grade, but the effect of morphological awareness became stronger over time. It is interesting that there is this relationship between the languages where as one grows stronger the other rows weaker and vice versa. One reason they suggested for this was the fact that these children had been speaking English in the home for the years before starting school, so they naturally rely more on English morphological awareness, but the more time they spend in school the more they are able to rely on French morphological awareness. However, one weakness they pointed out is that “the reliabilities of the Grade 1 French and Grade 3 English morphological awareness tasks were low. This is an important limitation of the present study; low reliabilities set an upper limit on the discovery of statistical relationships between variables. This is one possible reason for the inconsistent relationships between Grade 1 French and Grade 3 English morphological awareness and reading, because these are the points at which reliability is low.” So though I think it is clear from their results that morphological awareness does play a role in developing literacy and that there are some cross-linguistic effects for bilinguals, perhaps the exact relationship they showed here is nor entirely robust.
It was interesting to me that the morphological awareness of the language has something to do with the reading in different language. It was also interesting that the each morphological awareness work differently (“Early English morphological awareness made a substantial contribution to reading in English and French, whereas later French morphological awareness contributed to reading in both languages”). I am curious that how the result changes if these two languages are different (eg. English and Spanish / Japanese and Chinese).
This article examined whether morphological awareness contributes to reading development across languages, and not just for monolinguals. The study looked specifically at children who were biliterate English-French, following them from Grade 1 to Grade 3. All children came from English speaking homes, but were involved in French immersion classes beginning in either kindergarten or Grade 1. The results of the study found that early morphological awareness of English contributed to reading in French. Later morphological awareness of French impacted the reading of English. I wonder if the results would have been different if the immersion language had been a tonal language rather than French.
“Children may require some minimal amount of linguistic
proficiency to understand the individual sentences within the analogy
as well as to conduct morphological analysis within a language…”
So in order to read French, you must first know some French? Color me surprised! One wonders if the researchers knew this from the outset and couldn’t incorporate it into the study, or they smacked their foreheads in frustration once they realized.
Aside from that, I’m confused on what I assume is statistics jargon. What, for example, is a reliability measure for a task?
I agree that morphological awareness is a language-specific skill and therefore should be adapted for a single language and reading within a single language that do not cross over from one language to another as every language has it’s specific morphological. Cross linguistic contribution of morphological awareness in reading cause confusion for readers! It is very important here that second-language learners build their skills and knowledge in determining the transfer relationship. I wonder how past tense tasks in English and French have similar cognitive demands, specifically past and present actions and situations?! How about the irregular verbs in English!
This article examines the role of morphological awareness—as assessed with a past tense analogy task—in dual-language reading development in French immersion children. There is already evidence of links between morphological awareness and monolingual literacy and this study suggests that there is also evidence for transfer of morphological awareness between languages aiding literacy. These findings interest me in how they are related to a 5th grade student I am currently observing for a class in English as a second language education. She speaks Spanish as her first language and English as her second. While her language skills are apparently stronger (or at least equal to) her English speaking skills, she professes to only be able to read in English and has great difficulty reading in Spanish. If there is a great deal of crosslinguistic morphological transfer to reading, then her English literacy education should also contribute to her Spanish literacy. I’m wondering if there is less transfer if there has been no formal literacy instruction in one of the target languages, as such is the case for this particular student. If she were taught to read and write in Spanish now would there be a greater morphological transfer than she currently has access to in trying to read Spanish text?
Morphological awareness is something that I never really thought of in regard of achieving literacy in children. I thought it’s interesting that early measures of English morphological awareness affected both English and French reading, early measures of French only related to French reading. After reading this article, I thought of English speaking children with reading disabilities and dyslexia. I wondered if there are as many cases of reading disabilities and/or spelling difficulties in French speaking children.
This study proved cross linguistic transfer of morphological awareness that contributed to reading in French and English in a dual program. To add to Elena’s comment about her example of a 5th grade student, I think if this student is not in a dual program that has her L1 as the other language it would be difficult for any child that is not comparing both languages constantly to transfer the morphological awareness from one language to the other.
Traditionally, most people would expect students of French – a highly inflected language – to have an increased morphological awareness in the language than in English. The study appears to prove that there is cross-linguistic carry-over of skills relating to the formation of the past tense. To the extent that this test really is a measure of morphological awareness, it appears that longitudinal data regarding French showed that immersion students gained morphological awareness after increased proficiency in reading. This corroborates the notion that orthographic cues are instrumental in structuring learners’ conception of grammatical functions of morphemes. While it is clear that reading ability will influence morphological awareness, I cannot see how the inverse would be true, the two concepts being linked as they are. Besides, the author readily admits that the key limitation to the study is that all measures were conducted on the assumption the past tense transformations in a sentence analogy task were an adequate measure of morphological awareness.