Morphological awareness and affix knowledge in EFL reading via vocabulary breadth

Abstract

Morphological knowledge is a complex construct integral to vocabulary breadth and reading comprehension. To understand its complexity, researchers examine its dimensionality. First, this study contributes to this broad topic by investigating whether morphological awareness and affix knowledge, related concepts with a long history of investigation in second language (L2) research, constitute separate dimensions. Second, we examined how these concepts contribute to reading comprehension with vocabulary breadth as a mediator. We evaluated 508 Japanese university students using a series of linguistic tasks and analyzed their performance through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Our findings showed that morphological awareness and affix knowledge are distinct constructs. The study further revealed significant direct and indirect pathways from both variables to reading comprehension, mediated by vocabulary breadth, with a stronger overall effect of morphological awareness. Potential reasons for this result and pedagogical implications are discussed.