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eness, derivational morphological awareness or compound morphological awareness?
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Chapter Two Literature Review

This chapter wants to review some studies on the definition of reading comprehension, previousstudies on MA abroad and at home. The literature on the definition, classification and development of MAis presented in the context of English as the first language. And some Chinese researchers have mainlyfocused on the correlation between MA and reading comprehension. Various studies from abroad to homesuggest that English learners’ MA is significantly related to their performance on reading comprehension.Therefore, the current study wants to explore the relation between MA and reading comprehension abilityamong some Chinese junior middle school students.

2.1 Researches on the Nature of Reading Comprehension
English learning has four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among these skills,reading is regarded as the most significant skill in language learning, especially in the background ofEnglish as a second or foreign language. It is the crucial role of reading that draws many researchers’attention to study the nature of reading. Hence, it is important to introduce the diverse definitions of readingcomprehension.From now on, the definition of reading has been greatly changed by different linguists. Someresearchers thought that reading was a process of discovering the meaning of words, which meant readingcould be regarded as a process of decoding. And Goodman (1967) defined reading as a “psycholinguisticguessing game”, and in the process of reading, readers could reconstruct the writers’ printed message (citedfrom Li Lisheng, 2003). Goodman regarded this reconstructive process as a procedure of understanding andanalyzing the writers’ written message. While reading comprehension could be influenced by many factors,such as PA, MA, SA, vocabulary knowledge and so on. So the development of reading comprehensionneeded readers’ numerous abilities to understand the content of reading. Therefore, readers could use asmany abilities as possible to understand the unfamiliar words and/ or the underlying meaning of the text.And Urquhart and Weir (1998) thought that reading comprehension was a process of understanding andexplaining information came from the printed texts. Accordingly, they regarded reading comprehension as alanguage activity, which contained various cognitive procedures pertaining to performance on reading.Hence, reading comprehension ability should be comprised of some cognitive factors, such as strategies,reasoning and other skills.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Morphological Awareness Abroad
Many researchers were interested in metalinguistic awareness, and they defined it from differentviewpoints. Chaney (1994) gave a definition of metalinguistic awareness: “think explicitly about structuralfeatures of language and focus on the forms of language separately from the meanings”. While Nagy andAnderson (1998) thought that metalinguistic awareness was the ability to “reflect on and manipulate thestructural features of language”. Although the definitions of metalinguistic awareness were various,metalinguistic awareness mainly could be divided into PA, SA and MA. Therefore, many researchers paidmuch attention to the effects of PA, SA, MA or other factors on reading comprehension together.Nevertheless, the underst