Literacy background and morphological awareness in English among three types of EFL learners

• Main Author: Cui, Xuebo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2007
• Subjects: Second language acquisition; English language > Study and teaching > Foreign speakers; English language > Rhetoric > Study and teaching; Language awareness; Language and languages > Study and teaching; English Language and Literature; Linguistics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/147; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1146/viewcontent/CDTG004154_P__2_.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Studies on the literacy and metalinguistic awareness have shown that metalinguistic awareness has been found to develop gradually through progressive print processing experience (Bowey & Francis, 1991 Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987 Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987). Koda (2000) has investigated that L1 processing experience influences the development of L2 morphological awareness in specific and predictable ways, and that the nature of L2 metalinguistic awareness differs among learners with typologically diverse L1 backgrounds (Chinese or Korean). However, the nature of English metalinguistic awareness among EFL learners with bilingual background in both Korean and Chinese has not yet become a subject of research. This dissertation was sought to look at the more unusual structures produced by multilinguals (i.e., the Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals) and to assess them for the insights that they can provide into the process of acquiring a third language. The present study was conducted in Yanji City, the capital of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Northeast China. The experimental data from two trilingual groups (60 Korean-Chinese who were either literate or illiterate in Korean) and one bilingual group (30 Chinese) of adult EFL learners on their performance of two morphological awareness tasks have shown to provide evidence of contrasting patterns of morphological awareness in English among the three groups with diverse language backgrounds. This study also argued that prior language knowledge should be reactivated in the language classroom in order to increase metalinguistic awareness in both teachers and students.