Morphological awareness: Why and how to link it to Chinese literacy teaching and learning

This chapter highlights the importance of morphological awareness for Chinese literacy learning and teaching. The characteristics of the Chinese language in terms of morphology, such as the great number of homophones and homographs (especially homonyms), the importance of lexical com-pounding, and details of different substructures of compound words are first introduced. We then extend these ideas to testing, as we overview how to conceptualize and measure morphological awareness in Chinese. These measurement issues are tied to findings on the importance of morphological awareness for Chinese literacy development. In the next section, we con-sider Chinese morphology in relation to pedagogical issues, that is, the importance of explicit understanding of morphology for conventional Chinese literacy teaching and learning. Previous studies of morphological and other literacy skills training programs across languages are then introduced, followed by suggestions on how to improve Chinese teaching and learning via morphological awareness. A focus on morphological awareness can likely promote literacy learning not only for children who are native Chinese speakers, but also for children or adults who are learning Chinese as a foreign language. Copyright © 2010 Information Age Pub., Inc.