Effect of Three Methods of Morphological Awareness on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Reading Comprehension

This study scrutinized the development of Iranian intermediate EFL learners' reading comprehension through the employment of three methods of morphological awareness (i.e. Textual Enhancement (TE), Metalinguistic Explanation (ME) and Morpheme Recognition Task (MRT). To do so, 90 intermediate EFL learners were divided into three groups, each group including 30 participants. Each group was taught sixty English derivational affixes including prefixes, suffixes and roots through three methods of morphological awareness (i.e., TE, ME, and MRT). Due to the high frequency of derivational affixes, less common derivational affixes were utilized for the treatment. For the purpose of the study, a pretest-posttest design was adopted. Given that it was impossible to provide texts containing all English affixes, single-sentence reading comprehension tests were administered as both pretest and posttest. As the first objective of the study, the development of the learners' morphological awareness in the three groups was measured by conducting a series of paired-samples t-tests. The results revealed that there was a significant improvement for all three groups. As another objective of the study, the posttest results of the reading comprehension test of the three groups were compared by running a one-way ANOVA.