The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth-Grade Readers of English
Zhang, D; Ke, S
Date: 6 November 2019
Journal
Reading Research Quarterly
Publisher
International Reading Association / Wiley
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This study examined the complexity of the Simple View of Reading focusing on morphological
decoding fluency in fourth-grade readers of English in Singapore. The participants were three
groups of students who all learned to become bilingual and biliterate in the English language
(EL) and their respective ethnic language in school but ...
This study examined the complexity of the Simple View of Reading focusing on morphological
decoding fluency in fourth-grade readers of English in Singapore. The participants were three
groups of students who all learned to become bilingual and biliterate in the English language
(EL) and their respective ethnic language in school but differed in the home language they used.
The first group was ethnic Chinese students who used English as the dominant home language
(Chinese EL1); the other two groups were ethnic Chinese and Malay students whose dominant
home language was not English but Chinese (Chinese EL2) and Malay (Malay EL2),
respectively. The measures included pseudo word decoding (phonemic decoding), timed
decoding of derivational words (morphological decoding fluency), oral vocabulary, and passage
comprehension. Path analysis showed that oral vocabulary significantly predicted reading
comprehension across all three groups; yet a significant effect of morphological decoding
fluency surfaced in the Chinese EL1 and Malay EL2 groups but not the Chinese EL2 group.
Multi-group path analysis and commonality analysis further confirmed that morphological
decoding played a larger role in the in the Chinese EL1 and Malay EL2 groups. These findings
are discussed in light of the joint influence of target language experience and cross-linguistic
influence on second language or bilingual reading development.
School of Education
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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