Metamorfological skills and their incidence on reading comprehension

Abstract

Morphological awareness is referred to the conscious level of the morphemic structure of words, and the skills to manage and manipulate these structures. Different studies, mainly in English, suggest that the morphological processing plays an important role in reading skills acquisition, essential for language comprehension. Therefore, the objective of the present research was to study if there exists a relation between metamorfological skills and reading comprehension, and to develop a predictive analysis model of reading comprehension from the metamorfological skills. This study had a quantitative approach, and was an analytical correlational and transversal study. A Metamorfological Skills Assessment Test (MSAT) was design incorporating content validation using expert judgment and criterion validation with BLOC-R, getting an instrument with 4 subtests of analysis and morphological composition. This instrument was applied to 36 4th grade primary school students, in conjunction with the CLP test (Progressive Linguistic Complexity) to assess reading comprehension. As part of the results, we found that there is a relation between metamorfological skills and reading comprehension. The results also revealed that the morphological analysis skills, within a sentence context, are far more related to reading than the skill of derived words from a single root. Lineal regression was applied and it showed that there is a lineal relation between the scores of the ‘CLP’ and performance in the ‘Metamorfológicas Skills Assessment Test’. The model explains about 42.32% in variability of the results in reading comprehension.