The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth-Grade Readers of English

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 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.