Abstract:

The ultimate goal of reading is to achieve the understanding of written text information means reading comprehension, which is closely related to children’s future learning. In recent years, the effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on reading comprehension have received extensive attention. Besides, reading comprehension may be influenced not only by factors at the meta-linguistic level but also by higher-level language skills, such as reading fluency. Children in the early elementary grades are in the stage of “learning to read”. In this stage, the younger children are transitioning from word-reading mode to sentence silent mode. Sentence reading fluency is a deep structure of reading fluency. Its cognitive processing is more complex than that of word reading fluency, which may be affected by word reading fluency. However, few studies have been conducted on the possible relationships among phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading fluency, sentence silent reading fluency and reading comprehension, especially the chain mediating roles of word reading fluency and sentence silent reading fluency. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the predictive effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on children’s reading comprehension in the “learning to read” stage, as well as the chain mediating effects of word reading fluency and sentence silent reading fluency.
The study included 149 first-graders who were followed three times in two years, with their phonological awareness, morphological awareness measured at Time 1 (the fall semester in grade 1), word reading fluency and sentence silent fluency at Time 2 (the spring semester in grade 1), and reading comprehension at Time 3 (the fall semester in grade 2). In addition, general cognitive ability and auto-regression in reading comprehension, which were served as control variables, were also tested at Time 1 and Time 2 respectively. Spearman correlation analysis was used to investigate the correlation between variables. The results of the correlation analysis found phonological awareness was significantly associated with word reading fluency, sentence silent reading fluency and reading comprehension, and the correlation coefficient was between 0.28 and 0.33 (See Table 1). Meanwhile, word reading fluency and sentence silent reading fluency and reading comprehension were significantly related. In addition to homograph awareness, homophone awareness were significantly correlated with word reading fluency, sentence silent reading fluency and reading comprehension, and the correlation coefficient was between 0.24 and 0.41 (See Table 1 for details). And then, the structural equation model (SEM) was built to investigate the effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on reading comprehension and the chain mediating effects of word reading fluency and sentence silent reading fluency.
The results showed that: (1) phonological awareness and morphological awareness both could directly predict reading comprehension. (2) Word reading fluency mediates the relationship between phonological awareness and reading comprehension, and word reading fluency mediates morphological awareness and reading comprehension. (3) Word reading fluency and sentence silent reading fluency play a chain mediating role between phonological awareness and reading comprehension, and word reading fluency and sentence silent fluency play a chain mediating role between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. The results demonstrated that phonological awareness and morphological awareness not only play an important role in reading comprehension, but also affect sentence fluency through word reading fluency and ultimately affect reading comprehension (See Figure 1 for details).

Key words: reading comprehension, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, word reading fluency, sentence silent reading fluency