Morphological awareness and advanced listening comprehension in English as a foreign language

The goal of the study was to investigate the relation between morphological awareness and listening comprehension with 152 (N = 152) advanced Chinese learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Two facets of morphology, derivational and compound, were found to have different relationships with listening comprehension measured by a listening test from China’s Ministry of Education—including two tasks: (a) the multiple-choice task after interviews, and (b) the gap-filling task following a mini lecture. The study provides empirical evidence that derivational awareness is significantly correlated with listening comprehension but also is an important factor for successful performance on the gap-filling listening task. In contrast, compound awareness was observed to be of weak correlation with listening comprehension. The role that the two kinds of morphological awareness play in listening comprehension has commonality with and difference from that in reading comprehension.