The contributions of phonological and morphological knowledge to achievement in English KS2 and 3

Abstract

English orthography uses letters to represent sounds (phonemes) and to represent units of meaning, called morphemes. The word magician exemplifies this well. M and GI in magician represent the same sounds as they do in other words; the rest of the word would seem irregular if analysed in letter-sound correspondences. However, it is a regular word, formed by two morphemes: magic, the stem, and the suffix -ian. There is a growing body of evidence that students' knowledge of morphemes is important for spelling and reading comprehension in English. Using a large data set (over 2,500 students) and advanced statistical analyses, this project will investigate whether students' knowledge of both phonemes and morphemes are related to their later English achievement in standardised school assessments, and whether these two aspects of linguistic knowledge are associated with the students' socio-economic background. The results will contribute to a better understanding of literacy learning in primary school and will have implications for the democratisation of education.

Proposed programme

The project has two aims. First, to analyse the relative role of children's phonological and morphological skills in their English attainment in school and their reading comprehension. Second, to analyse the relationships between these cognitive factors and the children's socio-economic background.

The ALSPAC data base has measures of students' SES, general intelligence, vocabulary, working memory (WM), and their reading and spelling skills at ages 8 and 9. The reading and spelling measures (Nunes et al., 2003) include two groups of words and pseudowords: one group can be read or spelled using only phonological knowledge (e.g. slide and smape) but the second group requires the use of morphological knowledge (e.g. dishonest and mishammer). These measures will be used a predictors of three outcome measures: reading comprehension, obtained at age 9, and English achievement at KS2 and KS3. ) We propose to test whether the students' phonological and morphological knowledge at age 9 predicts their reading comprehension, and their later English KS2 & 3 achievement, after controlling for general intelligence, vocabulary and WM. The relationships between these measures and the students' SES will be further analysed in structural equation models. We hypothesise that students' linguistic knowledge is directly related to their English KS 2 & 3 achievement, and also mediates the connection between SES and their KS 2 & 3 achievement in English: SES differences affects the children's linguistic knowledge which in turn determines their KS 2 & 3 achievement.

These analyses will make significant contributions to knowledge about the development of reading and spelling and reading comprehension as well as English achievement in school. First, they will provide the first evidence on the separate contributions made by phonological and morphological knowledge to reading comprehension in the U.K. context. Second, KS assessments are an ecologically valid measure of school achievement; this will be the first analysis of how morphological and phonological knowledge relate to later English achievement in school designed measured. Third, the contribution of analyses of large data sets is unique: they offer a much more secure basis for generalisations and the development of educational policy. There are no previous large scale studies of the relationships between measures of phonological and morphological knowledge and later English achievement. Finally, if linguistic knowledge is shown to mediate the effects of SES on students' KS2 & 3 English attainment, this entirely new result will have important implications for curriculum development and should lead to better democratisation of education.