Bridging the Literacy Gaps: Examining the Impact of the Morphoread Intervention on the Reading Achievement of Children From Low SES Backgrounds.

This article focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of a targeted morphological awareness (MA) intervention, called MorphoRead, designed to improve reading comprehension among struggling second-grade Hebrew-speaking readers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Delivered by college education students, the program emphasized understanding word structure and meaning within a narrative context and was compared to a school-based reading support program and typical classroom instruction. Results showed that while all groups improved academically over the school year, the MA intervention group demonstrated significantly greater gains in orthographic word recognition, reading comprehension, spelling, and morphological awareness than the school-based support group, effectively narrowing the achievement gap with typical readers. No significant differences were found in overall reading motivation among groups, though the intervention group showed improved self-concept as readers. The study highlights the role of morphological awareness in enhancing lexical representations and reading acquisition, particularly in the context of Hebrew's complex morphology and orthography.