Morphological Awareness in Norwegian Pre-schoolers

Researchers in the field of reading have conceptualised the reflection on and conscious manipulation of the morphemic structures in words as morphological awareness and devised tasks to measure this construct. In doing so, different practises had been carried out making use of different morphological domains and tasks to capture the scope of this construct. Studies provide evidence that children’s preschool morphological awareness is an important contributor to the reading development in elementary school years. In the Norwegian language, morphological awareness has also an important role, as studies of children receiving explicit instruction in morphological awareness have performed better at word reading and reading comprehension than children receiving no training. Additionally, training in morphological awareness appears to foster growth in phonological awareness, as both skills seem to have a reciprocal effect. However, publications concerning validated assessment tools of morphological awareness for Norwegian pre-schoolers have not been found. In this study, the intention is to replicate and adapt the morphological awareness task of Diamanti et al. (2018) to the properties of the Norwegian language. The reason is that this study found that their tasks sufficed to measure morphological awareness and showed that morphological awareness measured in preschool made the best unique contribution in word accuracy, pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and spelling outcomes in first grade. Thus, the present study outlines the procedures to construct and validate this test with the intention of providing an assessment tool that other studies can use to examine the effect of morphological awareness in the reading development of Norwegian children. The empirical evidence about morphological awareness has led to the following research question: 1. Construction and Validation of a Morphological Awareness Test for Pre-schoolers This study has been supervised by the research group NumLit: Development of Numeracy and Literacy in Children from the department of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo, which will use the morphological awareness test in upcoming studies. The present study concerns applied research and consists in describing the construction and validation of the psychometrical properties of the test. For the pre-validation of the test, NumLit provided two samples of pre-schoolers, in which I have assessed two versions before constructing the final test. First I present the results from the first pilot study and amendments made to the first version. In the second pilot I report the results and explain the adjustments needed to create the final version of the test. For the final validation, the test was assessed in a sample of 246 pre-schoolers under the coordination of the research group. The results were carried out with R for Statistical Computing, with which I performed a correlation analysis in both pilot studies for the selection of the appropriate items. For the results from the last sample I performed a reliability analysis and an exploratory factor analysis. The results showed that the morphological awareness test had a high reliability of 0.85 (ωt) and 0.84 (α), which signifies that 85% of the test’s total variance is because of factors common to all the items and tasks. The analysis also demonstrated that 39% of the variance in the test is due to a single common factor. The exploratory factor analysis showed also that the three tasks used in this test grouped accordingly in three factors and showing the relation of each item to a general factor. The results of this study indicated that the morphological awareness task has a good reliability and validity as assessment tool