Comparing English-Speaking Third- Through Sixth-Grade Students' Performances on Spoken and Written Cloze...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Morphological awareness, the ability to consciously analyze morphemes, is crucial for literacy.
• Traditional assessments of morphological awareness often use spoken tasks, with limited research on modality effects.
• Understanding modality's influence is key for accurate assessment and effective literacy instruction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate differences in morphological awareness task performance between spoken and written modalities in 3rd-6th graders.
• To determine if written morphological awareness performance predicts literacy skills beyond spoken awareness and vocabulary.

Main Methods:

• Administered spoken and written cloze tasks to assess morphological awareness in English-speaking students (grades 3-6).
• Assessed word-level reading, decoding, spelling, and receptive vocabulary using standardized measures.
• Analyzed unique variance explained by written task performance on literacy measures.

Main Results:

• Students consistently performed better on spoken morphological awareness tasks compared to written ones across all grades.
• Spoken morphological awareness correlated with at least one literacy skill at each grade level.
• Written morphological awareness performance significantly predicted unique variance in all literacy measures, even after controlling for vocabulary and spoken task performance.

Conclusions:

• Written morphological awareness tasks offer valuable insights into literacy skills not captured by spoken tasks alone.
• Educators and researchers should incorporate written measures to fully assess morphological awareness in mid- to upper elementary students.
• Integrating both spoken and written assessments can enhance understanding of the morphological skills vital for word-level reading and spelling success.