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Chapter One Introduction

In modem society，it is critical to grasp a foreign language, especially English.Reading ability is very important for the development of individual's literacy，and it hasbeen a hot issue of educators, linguists，and psychologists for decades. For most Chinesestudents, reading is the most frequent way to grasp English and reading ability issignificantly related to learners' English level (Feng & Li, 2006). Up to now，it is aconsensus that reading is a complicated process involved a couple of factors，such asgeneral cognitive, verbal abilities and background knowledge. Besides，it is also widelyaccepted that vocabulary learning is an essential foundation for the using of language. Forsecond language learners, vocabulary may determine the development of our otherlanguage skill, especially literacy ability. In the past decade, there has been a surge ofinterest in morphological awareness that may contribute to both word and passage levelreading. In daily life, it is common that we may understand a word that we have nevermet before. Thus, language speakers must understand the underlying structure of words,especially for adults. The underlying structure of words is so called morphology or wordformation rules. In recent years，researchers have dedicated to clarifying the role ofmorphological awareness, one of metalinguistic abilities that has been regarded as a maindeterminant of reading acquisition (Gombert, 1992)，in the process of reading. Althoughthe study of morphologica] awareness has been given prominent importance in theresearch of psychological process of reading, its relationship with word reading abilitystill needs further study. Most of the studies so far are based on native English speakers(Li, 2007); therefore，we need more empirical evidence from ESL learners to reveal therelation between morphological awareness and word reading.
In the present study, we centered on morphological awareness of Chinese teenagers，from Junior 3 to Senior 2，to explore its relationship with word level reading abilitytaking nonverbal ability into consideration. To be specific，the questions we propose arewhether morphological awareness plays an import role for English learners in China?And which dimension of morphological awareness is the most powerful predictor of word level reading? And what's the tendency of morphological development acrossgrades?The previous researches on morphological awareness have placed so much emphasison particular grammatical forms and syntax development as well as its contribution topassage reading. However, it is not appropriate to examine a particular grammatical formof Chinese students, because a specific grammatical form is highly related to grade.Therefore, the morphological awareness that we examined in the present study is anintegral morphological ability involving both derivational morphology and inflectionalmorphology. Besides，most of the students in China begin to leam English from thirdgrade in primary school while they seldom speak or write English in daily life. For thelack of exposure to English, their English competence develops quite slowly during thisperiod. Thus the subjects we choose in the present study are students from junior schooland senior school instead of primary school.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Morphological Awareness
A morpheme is the smallest unit in a language that connect本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。