英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Nowadays, it is vital to acquire a foreign language, especially English. English learners have toacquire four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. And reading is the most important oneamong them. The reason is that reading can be used as a significant predictor to language learners’ literacy.Some researchers have stated that reading ability is usually used to as an important component to testEnglish learners’ level, so reading is the main way to learn English. Reading comprehension is a process ofgetting meaning from the written form, and a useful way of communicating with the writer who write thetext. Therefore, it is easily seen that reading plays an important role in English learning and teaching. Tostrengthen students’ reading skills and improve students’ reading abilities, English teachers have to payconsiderable attention to the teaching of reading. So far, many researchers have come to an agreement thatreading is a complex process contained various factors or components, such as grammatical knowledge,vocabulary knowledge, PA, MA and so on.On the basis of componential model of reading, many researchers have supported that readingcomprehension contains many factors or components which could influence language learners’performance on reading comprehension. As for the componential approach, it aims to identify and analyzethe possible components or factors in the process of reading comprehension instead of interpreting howthese components work in the process of reading. Some researches have found that language learners’performance on reading comprehension can be influenced by some factors, such as, PA, MA, vocabularyknowledge, grammatical knowledge and so on. The four basic language skills are based on the students’vocabulary knowledge (Barrow et al, 1999). English learners’ vocabulary size is one sign of SLA, and thedevelopment of MA can enlarge one’s vocabulary size. Carlisle (2003), Kuo and Anderson (2006) have putforward that MA emerged from early language acquisition and later became developed.However, few researchers have put three kinds of morphological awareness into the same level andstudied their correlation and contribution to reading comprehension. Many findings come frommonolingual English children, and the present study will test the effects of the three kinds of MA onEnglish reading comprehension among some Chinese junior middle school students.
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1.2 Purpose of the Present Study
The previous studies mostly focus on the influence of vocabulary knowledge, MA, PA, SA or othercomponents on reading comprehension ability integrally. However, few researchers have separately studied the effects of MA on Chinese EFL learners’ reading comprehension. So it is necessary to do this study toexplore the individual effect of MA on reading comprehension, which is on the basis of CMR.Consequently, the present study aims to explore the influence of these three kinds of MA on some Chinesejunior middle school students’ English reading comprehension. Hence, this study is going to research thefollowing two questions:1) Is there a significant correlation relationship between morphological awareness and English readingcomprehension among junior middle school students after controlling the effects of nonverbal intelligence?2) Which kind of MA could contribute most to reading comprehension, inflectional morphologicalawar