Contribution of L2 morphological awareness to passage-level l2 reading comprehension above and beyond vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge and reading strategy use among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners

The primary objective of the present study was to investigate to what extent intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners are aware of lexical and grammatical functions of certain suffixes in English. The study further aimed at exploring the unique contribution of L2 morphological awareness to passage-level L2 reading comprehension above and beyond such reading-related factors as vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge and reading strategy use among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners. With these purposes, the data were collected from a total of 87 EFL learners through a number of testing instruments. These instruments consist of reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge subtests of the proficiency exam that Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages (AUSFL) administered at the end of 2014-2015 fall semester, Turkish version of Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) by Sheorey and Mokhtari (2002) and the two-section Morphological Awareness Test (MAT), designed by the researcher with some adaptation from Mahony (1993) for the current study. The data were analysed using a number of statistical procedures. The first research question, which is about exploring to what extent intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners are aware of lexical and grammatical functions of certain suffixes in English, was answered by means of descriptive statistics, paired samples t-test and one-way ANOVA with repeated measures. The second research question, which is about the unique contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension above and beyond vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge and reading strategy use, was responded through hierarchical multiple regression and bivariate regression analyses. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a smaller group of the participants to support the data gathered from the quantitative data collection instruments of the present study. The results of the study revealed that intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners show at least moderate awareness of English word morphology. It was also found that the participants could judge whether a morphologically complex word comes from a simple word better than they identified the lexical and grammatical functions of certain derivational suffixes in English. Moreover, suffix categories and each suffix in each category used in the present study affected the participants' performance. The results further revealed that L2 morphological awareness does not make a direct contribution to L2 reading comprehension among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners either along with or above and beyond vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge and reading strategy use. However, further analysis revealed that morphological awareness might make an indirect contribution to L2 reading comprehension via its direct contribution to L2 vocabulary knowledge. Additionally, the semi-structured interviews displayed that intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners are likely to benefit from word morphology in foreign language learning. The findings were discussed with regard to the previous research, and implications and suggestions for further research were offered. Key words: Intra-word structure, word morphology, morphological awareness, L2 reading comprehension, Turkish EFL learners.