Leveraging L2 English Proficiency to Enhance Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension in L3 French: An Action Research Study with Thai Learners
Keywords:
morphological awareness, crosslinguistic transfer, bilingual pedagogy, French language acquisition, reading comprehensionAbstract
This action research examines the potential of leveraging Thai learners’ proficiency in L2 English to enhance their morphological awareness and reading comprehension in L3 French. A total of 27 Thai learners with an intermediate level of English and a pre-intermediate level of French participated in the study. The research involved a pedagogical intervention aimed at increasing their awareness of morphological correspondences between French and English. It incorporated activities that highlighted crosslinguistic morphological patterns and utilized their English skills to facilitate the acquisition of French morphology. The intervention included a combination of guided observation techniques, such as input flood and textual enhancement, to emphasize morphological patterns common to both languages. A morphological awareness test comprising 48 items and a reading comprehension assessment consisting of 10 questions were administered before and after the intervention to measure its impact. The results revealed an improvement in both morphological awareness and reading comprehension in French and suggest that pedagogical interventions emphasizing morphological similarities between L2 English and L3 French have the potential to enhance morphological awareness and improve reading comprehension in L3 French.
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