The effectiveness of using morphological instruction to improve striving ESL students’ performance in reading comprehension

This paper investigates the effectiveness of morphological instruction intervention programme on improving striving learners’ reading performance after a 5-session pulled-out intervention programme for 5 students in a local Hong Kong secondary school where students are of lower English proficiency. Both quantitative data from pretest and posttest, and qualitative data from interview of the intervention group were collected to manifest a comprehensive picture of the programme and its effectiveness. Results indicated that the intervention was to a large extent ineffective in improving students’ reading performance but advanced students’ morphological awareness and vocabulary capacity. Longer duration of the programme, explicit and repeated recalling of skills and teacher-centered instruction were identified to be favorable factors for striving learners to benefit most from morphological instruction as such. Results of the study also implicated students’ passiveness in English reading is a result of the ineffective and mechanical vocabulary-learning strategies that they were previously taught.