UC Irvine

Reading is a complex skill composed of a wide array of language and literacy subskills. In this dissertation, I explored how morphological awareness is related with vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension in Korean and English in the context of Korean-speaking middle school students in South Korea who were learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In Study 1, I examined how morphological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension were directly and indirectly related for the students’ Korean, their L1. Then, in Study 2, I looked at their aforementioned skills in both Korean (L1) and English (L2). I first tested the multidimensionality of morphological awareness in Korean and English, using three types of morphological awareness—inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological awareness. Then, I explored how their morphological awareness was related with vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension across Korean and English. Lastly, for Study 3, I delved into morphological analysis—one of the mechanisms through which morphological awareness is associated with vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension—and examined whether it played a role in explaining the relation of morphological awareness with vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension for the Korean students’ English.One hundred and twenty-one Grade 7 students from two middle schools in a metropolitan city in South Korea participated in this study. The students were measured in morphological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension in Korean and English, and morphological analysis only in English. In Study 1, I found morphological awareness predicted reading comprehension both directly and indirectly via word reading in Korean. In Study 2, morphological awareness was found to be multidimensional by language (Korean and English), and morphological awareness in Korean predicted reading comprehension in English via reading comprehension in Korean and morphological awareness in English. Study 3 revealed that morphological analysis partially mediated the relation of morphological awareness with reading comprehension over and above vocabulary and word reading in English.