Despite the recognized importance of morphological knowledge to literacy outcomes such as vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, two of its subconstructs— morphological awareness and morphological processing—have received comparatively little attention. In response, the aim of the study reported here was to examine how the relationships between morphological awareness and morphological processing, especially in terms of morphological transparency and morphological frequency, contribute to the vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension of 62 native Korean-speaking secondary school students—27 eighth-graders and 35 tenth-graders— learning English as a foreign language. The students’ performance on the Test of Morphological Structure and the Word Reading Test was assessed to gauge their compounding awareness, inflectional awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. The results indicated that the students’ performance was varied depending on morphological transparency and frequency. In addition, it was not morphological processing, but rather morphological awareness that explained variances in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, when compounding awareness and inflectional awareness were controlled for. This paper discusses what such findings imply for teaching English as a foreign language to Korean learners.

This study explores the morphological awareness of different graders with different vocabulary levels. A total of 275 elementary students (148 5th graders and 127 6th graders) across small, midium and large cities are selected to test their morphological awareness. First, they were divided into 30%, 40% and 30% of students according to their vocabulary levels. Second, they were tested on the recognition tests, the production tests and the distributional tests of English derivational morphemes divided by the prefixes and the suffixes appeared in the English textbooks. The results are: The recognition and production tests show significant differences for both vocabulary levels and different English levels across different grades. However, the distributional test shows no clear difference like the other two tests. Based on the results, the study draws the conclusion that morphological awareness is developing in the order of recognition, production and distribution of morphologized words in sentences. In other words, recognition of forms precedes the production of forms, and the production is followed by the functional awareness of morphologized words.