Reading comprehension and morphology: English sample

Cain, Kate (2018). Reading comprehension and morphology: English sample. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851939

Good reading comprehension is critical for education and employment success, thus it is essential that we understand the factors that influence its development. This research will advance knowledge about the development of reading comprehension, by elucidating the influence of morphological awareness in a cross-language study. We will compare two groups of readers: English children learning to read English, and Hong Kong Chinese children who are learning to read Chinese and English in parallel.

Morphemes are the smallest meaning units within (spoken) words: 'un' is a morpheme that, when added to a base word, indicates 'not' as in 'unhappy'. We are comparing developing readers of English and Chinese because these languages differ in the relative importance of morphemes in the writing system: The English writing system represents the spoken sounds (phonemes) of the language, whereas the Chinese writing system represents the meaning units (morphemes). We will determine the relative influence of morphological awareness on reading comprehension at different stages of development, by studying children aged 8 to 14 years, and determine if the influence of morphological awareness is language-general or language-specific.

The knowledge generated from this research will influence reading development theory and also pedagogy for first and second language learners.

Data description (abstract)

The following measures were administered to children in their classrooms. Children recorded their responses in answer booklets. Three measures of morphological awareness that required a judgement response to assess awareness of compound words (all novel compound words, score = total correct), inflectional morphology (real and nonword items, score = total correct), derivational morphology (real and nonword items, score = total correct). The morphology measures are uploaded as word documents.

The following measures were administered to children individually. The assessor recorded each child's responses in the appropriate response booklet. Individually administered: York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (ability score for word reading accuracy, reading comprehension, reading rate); Test of Word Reading Efficiency (raw scores for decoding and sight word efficiency subtests); Syllable and Phoneme Elision from the Comprehension Test of Phonological Processing (raw scores for each).
Snowling, M. J., Stothard, S. E., Clarke, P., Bowyer-Crane, C., Harrington, A., Truelove, E., & Hulme, C. (2009). York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC): GL Assessment.
Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1999). Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP).
Torgesen, J. K., Wagner, R. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (2011). Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) (2 ed.): Psychological Corporation.

In addition, three measures of morphological awareness that required generation of an oral response to assess awareness of compound words (all novel compound words, score = total correct), inflectional morphology (real and nonword items, score = total correct), derivational morphology (real and nonword items, score = total correct). These materials are uploaded as word documents.

In addition, we administered a shortened (selected items) version of the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (to reduce testing time) to estimate receptive vocabulary and a shortened measure of Raven's coloured progressive matrices to estimate nonverbal reasoning (to reduce testing time).
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, D. M. (2007). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition: Pearson Assessment.
Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (2008). Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices. London: Pearson Assessment.

We also include age and gender and Year group as variables.

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