The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension among EFL college students: assessing the applicability of the morphological pathway framework

The contribution of morphological knowledge to literacy skills has been well-established in previous research. Discrepancies have been detected in how such influence is realized among different populations. This study aimed to examine the applicability of the morphological pathway framework among EFL learners, focusing on morphosemantic knowledge. To achieve this aim, data were collected over the course of three weeks from 101 college-level students taking an intensive English language course. A battery of paper-based and computer-based tests was used to measure learners’ morphosemantic knowledge, morphological-based lexical inferencing, morphological decomposition ability, vocabulary size, and reading comprehension. The study revealed that while morphological-based lexical inferencing greatly mediated the effect of morphosemantic knowledge on reading comprehension, morphological decomposition did not account for any difference. Structural equation modeling analysis uncovered a different processing mechanism, where morphological decomposition facilitates lexical inferencing rather than reading comprehension. The analysis also revealed that the contributions of morphosemantic knowledge and processing were highly dependent on lexical processes, whereby vocabulary mediated the effect of morphosemantic knowledge and significantly assisted in lexical disambiguation. This indicates that L1 and L2 readers follow different morphological processing routes during reading. The findings have implications for morphology and reading instruction in the EFL context.