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The core components of reading instruction in Chinese
Reading and Writing
Abstract
The present study aimed at identifying core components of reading instruction in Chinese within the framework of the tiered
intervention model. A curriculum with four teaching components of cognitive-linguistic skills was implemented in a Program
school for 3years since Grade 1. The findings showed that the Tier 1 intervention was effective in enhancing the literacy
and cognitive-linguistic skills of children in the Program school. The positive effects were maintained at the end of Grade
2. Progress in both word-level and text-level cognitive-linguistic skills predicted significantly progress in reading comprehension.
Based on the present findings, the four core reading components in Chinese were proposed—oral language, morphological awareness,
orthographic skills, and syntactic skills. Comparing the Big Five in English and the four core components in Chinese reflects
different cognitive demands for reading diverse orthographies.
KeywordsChinese–Cognitive-linguistic skills–Reading instruction–Tiered intervention
... Studies in alphabetic languages have indicated that orthographic awareness at early stages is a strong predictor of subsequent reading acquisition (Badian, 2001;Boets et al., 2008). In recent decades, an increasing number of studies have identified the feature of orthographic awareness in Chinese, and its influence on Chinese word reading in typically developing children (e.g., Siok and Fletcher, 2001;Li et al., 2002;Ho et al., 2003bHo et al., , 2012Cheung et al., 2007;Tong et al., 2009;Tong and McBride-Chang, 2010), and those with dyslexia (e.g., Ho et al., 2002Ho et al., , 2004Chung et al., 2010). However, little attention has been paid to examine the influence from word reading to orthographic awareness, or their bidirectional relationship. ...
... Left-right (as in " "), top-down (as in " "), half-circle (as in " "), and a full circle (as in " ") are four basic structures of character configurations. Strokes, radicals, and characters are the three different levels that constitute the Chinese writing system (Ding et al., 2004;Ho et al., 2012). Strokes are the basic structure unit of characters (e.g., " " " " " "). ...
... As mentioned above, in recent decades, more and more research has addressed the contributions of orthographic knowledge to word reading in Chinese in typically developing children (e.g., Siok and Fletcher, 2001;Li et al., 2002;Ho et al., 2003bHo et al., , 2012Cheung et al., 2007;Tong et al., 2009;Tong and McBride-Chang, 2010), and research on Chinese children with dyslexia (e.g., Ho et al., 2002Ho et al., , 2004Chung et al., 2010). Empirical evidence from intervention studies has also supported the contributions from orthographic knowledge to reading performance in preschoolers (Wang and McBride, 2016). ...
The present study examined developmental changes, over a 6-year period, in the relationship between character reading ability and orthographic awareness in Chinese from the first year of kindergarten to the third year of primary school in two separate samples: the kindergarten sample of 96 children was assessed three times in the first, second, and third years of kindergarten (K1, K2, K3) with 12-month intervals. The primary school sample of 204 children was assessed four times in the first and second semesters of grade 1 (P1-S1; P1-S2), first semester of grade 2 (P2-S1) and grade 3 (P3-S1), with the first three waves at 6-month intervals and the final wave at 12-month interval. Cross-lagged path analysis showed three developmental stages of the relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness. At stage 1, reading ability in K1 and K2 predicted subsequent orthographic awareness in K2 and K3. At stage 2, there was a bidirectional relationship between character reading and orthographic awareness from P1-S1 to P1-S2. At stage 3, orthographic awareness at P1-S2 and P2-S1 predicted subsequent character reading ability at P2-S1 and P3-S1, but the prediction from reading to orthographic awareness vanished at this stage. The results depict a full developmental picture of the changed relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness over time. Beginning readers demonstrated impressive abilities in discovering or extracting orthographic regularities with increased reading ability.
... Studies in alphabetic languages have indicated that orthographic awareness at early stages is a strong predictor of subsequent reading acquisition (Badian, 2001;Boets, Wouters, Van Wieringen, De Smedt & Ghesquie`re, 2008). In recent decades, an increasing number of studies have identified the feature of orthographic awareness in Chinese, and its influence on Chinese word reading in typically developing children (e.g., Cheung, Chan, & Chong, 2007;Ho et al., 2012;Ho, Yau, & Au, 2003;Li, Anderson, Nagy & Zhang, 2002;Siok & Fletcher, 2001;Tong & McBride-Chang, 2010;Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu, & Wong, 2009), and those with dyslexia (e.g., Chung, Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2010;Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, Luan, 2004;Ho, Chan, Tsang, Lee, 2002). However, little attention has been paid to examine the influence from word reading to orthographic awareness, or their bidirectional relationship. ...
... Left-right (as in "明"), top-down (as in "草"), half-circle (as in "逃"), and a full circle (as in "国") are four basic structures of character configurations. Strokes, radicals, and characters are the three different levels that constitute the Chinese writing system (Ding, Peng, & Taft, 2004;Ho et al., 2012). ...
... As mentioned above, in recent decades, more and more research has addressed the contributions of orthographic knowledge to word reading in Chinese in typically developing children (e.g., Cheung, et al., 2007;Ho et al., 2012;Ho, Yau, et al., 2003;Li, et al., 2002;Siok & Fletcher, 2001;Tong & McBride-Chang, 2010;Tong, et al., 2009), and research on Chinese children with dyslexia (e.g., Chung et al., 2010;Ho et al., 2004;Ho et al., 2002). Empirical evidence from intervention studies has also supported the contributions from orthographic knowledge to reading performance in preschoolers (Wang, McBride, 2016). ...
Word count: 228 The present study examined developmental changes, over a six-year period, in the relationship between character reading ability and orthographic awareness in Chinese from the first year of kindergarten to the third year of primary school in two separate samples: the kindergarten sample of 96 children was assessed three times in the first, second and third years of kindergarten (K1, K2, K3) with 12-month intervals. The primary school sample of 204 children was assessed four times in the first and second semesters of grade 1 (P1-S1; P1-S2), first semester of grade 2 (P2-S1) and grade 3 (P3-S1), with the first three waves at 6-month intervals and the final wave at 12-month interval. Cross-lagged path analysis showed three developmental stages of the relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness. At stage 1, reading ability in K1 and K2 predicted subsequent orthographic awareness in K2 and K3. At stage 2, there was a bidirectional relationship between character reading and orthographic awareness from P1-S1 to P1-S2. At stage 3, orthographic awareness at P1-S2 and P2-S1 predicted subsequent character reading ability at P2-S1 and P3-S1, but the prediction from reading to orthographic awareness vanished at this stage. The results depict a full developmental picture of the changed relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness over time. Beginning readers demonstrated impressive abilities in discovering or extracting orthographic regularities with increased reading ability. Contribution to the field • The present study examined developmental changes, over a six-year period, in the relationship between character reading ability and orthographic awareness in Chinese from the first year of kindergarten to the third year of primary school (i.e., K1, K2, K3, P1, P2, P3) in two separate samples of kindergarteners and primary school graders. • Cross-lagged path analysis showed three developmental stages of the relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness, which are novel findings in the field. • At stage 1, reading ability in K1 and K2 predicted subsequent orthographic awareness in K2 and K3. • At stage 2, there was a bidirectional relationship between character reading and orthographic awareness in P1. • At stage 3, orthographic awareness at P1 and P2 predicted subsequent character reading ability at P2 and P3, but the prediction from reading to orthographic awareness vanished at this stage.
... As the unique morphology of Chinese (Packard, 2000), MA is salient for Chinese children's language and literacy development (McBride-Chang et al., 2003;Liu et al., 2013;Zhang et al., 2014;Cheng et al., 2015). Studies on Chinese reading development suggest that MA is important for RC beyond PA, vocabulary, and WR (Shu et al., 2006;Tong et al., 2009;Ho et al., 2012;Zhang et al., 2012;Yeung et al., 2013). Moreover, there is growing evidence that the relationship between MA and RC would be reciprocal (Kruk and Bergman, 2013;Deacon et al., 2014). ...
... The contribution of MA to Chinese children's RC was established in several previous studies (Shu et al., 2006;Tong et al., 2009;Ho et al., 2012;Zhang et al., 2012;Yeung et al., 2013). In a 1-year longitudinal study with Cantonese-speaking children in kindergarten to grade 1, regression analysis results demonstrated that MA, measured with compounding awareness and homophone awareness, was associated with concurrent and longitudinal RC at the sentence level with reading-related variables statistically controlled (Tong et al., 2009). ...
... In the other direction, children's RC was a predictor of later MA. The findings are consistent with conclusions offered by previous studies to the effect that MA uniquely contributes to RC among Chinese children (Shu et al., 2006;Tong et al., 2009;Ho et al., 2012; FIGURE 2 | The final model (M 4 ) with a completely standardized solution to address the relationship between MA and RC after controlling for phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and general cognitive ability. MA, morphological awareness; CA, compounding awareness; HPA, homophone awareness; HNA, homonym awareness. ...
The present study examined the developmental relationship between morphological awareness (MA) and reading comprehension (RC) using a 2-year and four-wave cross-lagged design with a sample of 149 Chinese children (80 males and 69 females). We measured children’s MA, word reading (WR), and RC from T1 to T4, in addition to phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and general cognitive ability at T1 as control measures. Four plausible cross-lagged models were assessed and compared to examine the direction of the developmental relationships between MA and RC over time. Results found support for a reciprocal-causation model, that is, MA stably predicted subsequent RC, and the reverse relation was also found. Longitudinal mediation analyses revealed that WR partially mediated the relationship between MA and RC in Chinese children. These findings extend our understanding of the relationship between MA and RC. The practical implications for these two developing skills in Chinese children are discussed.
... The mnemonic that assists in remembering the form, meaning, and sound of this written character 掰 [bai1] "break off" is that 两手分开就是掰 "separating two hands is to break off." Because Chinese orthography consists of at least 2,000 possible different graphic patterns to be learned for novice readers , and beginning Chinese readers are often explicitly taught to decompose and identify the separate visual components of a new character (Ho et al. 2012), it is important to know to what extent visual skills affect children's Chinese reading acquisition. ...
... 193). Additionally, very few intervention studies explore the effectiveness of remedial visual skills training on later Chinese reading acquisition (e.g., Ho et al. 2012). There has been no systematic review of the relation between visual skills and Chinese reading acquisition, and a conclusion regarding this relation remains unclear. ...
This paper used meta-analysis to synthesize the relation between visual skills and Chinese reading acquisition based on the empirical results from 34 studies published from 1991 to 2011. We obtained 234 correlation coefficients from 64 independent samples, with a total of 5,395 participants. The meta-analysis revealed that visual skills as a global construct had a medium correlation effect size (r = 0.32) associated with Chinese reading acquisition. The various visual processing skills differed in their relation to Chinese reading acquisition in different stages. Visual perception, speed of processing visual information, and pure visual memory had low-to-moderate correlations with Chinese reading acquisition in the lower grades (i.e., below second grade), whereas these relations did not retain their magnitude for children in the higher grades (i.e., second through sixth grades). By contrast, visual–verbal association skill was found to account for 34 and 41 % of the variance in children’s Chinese reading acquisition in both lower and higher grade levels, respectively. Greater attention to this construct can significantly benefit reading research and instructional practice. No regional differences between studies in Mainland China and Hong Kong were found in the meta-analysis.
... The predominant role of memorization in Chinese primary students is also related to language characteristics and developmental stages. Chinese is a no-inflectional language without a normative grammatical system (Ho et al., 2011). Chinese reading comprehension strongly depends on the language context (Shu et al., 1995). ...
Background: Learning is a self-regulated loop where learning strategies and achievements are interrelated. In reading, although some studies have explored the relationship between different learning strategies (memorization, elaboration and control) and reading achievement, little is known about how they interact over time. Even though the longitudinal relationship was revealed in some studies, most of the evidence was based on the whole population, regardless of gender differences. Aims: This study was designed to examine the longitudinal relationship between memorization, elaboration, control strategies and reading achievement, as well as the gender difference in the longitudinal relationship. Sample: The sample consisted of 3878 Chinese students (2025 boys, 1853 girls) who were surveyed in Grade 4 and Grade 6. Methods: A cross-lagged model was conducted to examine the longitudinal relationship between memorization, elaboration , control strategies and reading achievement while controlling for gender, age and parents' educational levels. Multigroup cross-lagged models were conducted to examine gender differences in the longitudinal relationship between these variables. Results: Memorization and elaboration strategies were reciprocally related. Both predicted subsequent control strategies, but not vice versa. Only memorization strategies positively predicted subsequent reading achievement, while prior reading achievement positively predicted the subsequent three strategies. The effects of prior reading achievement on subsequent learning strategies were stronger for boys. Conclusions: Memorization strategies play a prominent role in promoting deeper strategies and reading achievement in Chinese primary schools, which might relate to
... The predominant role of memorization in Chinese primary students is also related to language characteristics and developmental stages. Chinese is a no-inflectional language without a normative grammatical system (Ho et al., 2011). Chinese reading comprehension strongly depends on the language context (Shu et al., 1995). ...
Background
Learning is a self‐regulated loop where learning strategies and achievements are interrelated. In reading, although some studies have explored the relationship between different learning strategies (memorization, elaboration and control) and reading achievement, little is known about how they interact over time. Even though the longitudinal relationship was revealed in some studies, most of the evidence was based on the whole population, regardless of gender differences.
Aims
This study was designed to examine the longitudinal relationship between memorization, elaboration, control strategies and reading achievement, as well as the gender difference in the longitudinal relationship.
Sample
The sample consisted of 3878 Chinese students (2025 boys, 1853 girls) who were surveyed in Grade 4 and Grade 6.
Methods
A cross‐lagged model was conducted to examine the longitudinal relationship between memorization, elaboration, control strategies and reading achievement while controlling for gender, age and parents' educational levels. Multigroup cross‐lagged models were conducted to examine gender differences in the longitudinal relationship between these variables.
Results
Memorization and elaboration strategies were reciprocally related. Both predicted subsequent control strategies, but not vice versa. Only memorization strategies positively predicted subsequent reading achievement, while prior reading achievement positively predicted the subsequent three strategies. The effects of prior reading achievement on subsequent learning strategies were stronger for boys.
Conclusions
Memorization strategies play a prominent role in promoting deeper strategies and reading achievement in Chinese primary schools, which might relate to culture and developmental stages. Higher achievement or positive feedback from learning results might be motivation for using different strategies, especially for boys.
... However, evidence supporting the importance of phonological awareness to Chinese reading has been inconclusive Ho et al., 2012;Yeung et al., 2014). For example, some studies indicated that phonological awareness in L1 Chinese correlates more strongly with L2 English phonological awareness and English word reading than with other L1 Chinese literacy measures in typically developing children (Keung & Ho, 2009;Shum et al., 2016). ...
Purpose:
Skills developed from literacy training in L1 are shown to transfer to reading in L2 when both languages involve an alphabetic writing system. However, transfer of literacy skills between a logographic L1 and an alphabetic L2 is less studied. This study examined whether the gain in literacy skills after an 8-week training on 1) Chinese character recognition or 2) English phonics, may generalize across the two languages in Chinese elementary students with reading disabilities.
Methods:
Chinese-speaking students identified with reading difficulties were randomly assigned to the Chinese intervention (Chinese character orthography trainings), English intervention (English phonics training), and control groups. Their Chinese and English literacy skills were measured before and after the interventions.
Results:
Though training on the orthography of Chinese characters significantly improved performance in Chinese word reading and Chinese orthographic awareness, our results did not provide evidence for the generalization of word-decoding skills from L1 Chinese to word reading in L2 English. However, phonics training in L2 English benefitted not only English word reading, but also cross-language word reading in L1 Chinese.
Conclusion:
We postulated that teaching children analytical skills in decoding words in an alphabetic writing system might likewise benefit their word decoding in a logographic script.
... It was also hypothesized that arithmetic concept is positively related to word problem solving, with knowledge of mathematical vocabularies being the mediator (numberrelated pathway). Reading skill was measured by reading fluency, which is an indicator of skilled reading and facilitates rapid integration of concepts in sentences (Ho et al., 2012). Because reading fluency is a significant predictor of word problem solving among elementary school children (Fuchs et al., 2006;Kail & Hall, 1999;Vilenius-Tuohimaa, Aunola, & Nurmi, 2008), it was used as a proxy of reading skill in this study. ...
When solving word problems, many children encounter difficulties in making sense of the information and integrate it into a meaningful schema. This is the fundamental phase on which subsequent problem solution depends. To better understand the processing underlying this fundamental phase, this study examined the roles of schema construction and knowledge of mathematical vocabularies in word problem solving. The participants were 139 Chinese third graders studying in Hong Kong. Path analysis showed that there were two kinds of pathways to word problem solving: language-related and number-related. In particular, reading fluency was related to word problem solving in two mediated language-related pathways: one via schema construction, the other via knowledge of mathematical vocabularies. In the number-related pathway, arithmetic concept was related to word problem solving via knowledge of mathematical vocabularies. These findings highlight the specific roles of schema construction and mathematical vocabulary in word problem solving, thereby providing useful implications of how best to support children in understanding and integrating the information from the problem.
... Second, due to time constraints, only one measure was administered for each training domain. Multiple measures, such as rhyme detection and homophone awareness (e.g., Ho et al., 2012;Zhou et al., 2012), should be incorporated in future research to provide a more comprehensive view about the effectiveness of the JOLLY reading program. Third, although children participating in the reading program improved their skills and knowledge, some of this growth might not be sufficient to be recorded as statistically significant. ...
Research Findings: This study evaluated the impacts of a bilingual Chinese-
English reading program on Chinese children from low socioeconomic status
(SES) families. Ninety-nine children in the third year of kindergarten (K3) were
recruited from five local kindergartens in two low-SES districts in Hong Kong,
China. Children in the intervention group who participated in 15-weeks of
language and literacy intervention were compared to a control group of 40
children who attended only regular literacy classes in their kindergartens.
ANCOVA analyses revealed that after controlling for child gender and age,
the intervention group performed significantly better than the control group
on the posttest in Chinese phonological awareness and morphological
awareness, English phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and
English word reading. These results point to a reading program’s utility,
emphasizing multi-component interventions for early bilingual language
and literacy learning. Practice or Policy: Findings support the development
of locally derived, evidence-based reading programs to cater to low-SES
children’s learning needs. These findings may also provide research-based
evidence for formulating public policies and services, targeting the early
language and literacy issues for low-SES children and their families and
raising public awareness of the influence of poverty on child development
in the early years.
... While the majority of research in the literature focuses on alphabetic scripts, there is a growing number of studies of visual-orthographic processing and its association with reading processes in Chinese reading development [32][33][34][35] . It has been suggested that visual processing plays a more vital role in the Chinese writing system, generally considered to be a logographic script, than in alphabetic reading, given the relatively complex visual features of Chinese characters 36 . ...
Expert face recognition has long been marked by holistic processing. Hence, due to the many visual properties shared between face perception and Chinese characters, it has been suggested that Chinese character recognition may induce stronger holistic processing in expert readers than in novices. However, there have been different viewpoints presented about Chinese character recognition, one of which suggests that expertise in this skill involved reduced holistic processing which may be modulated by writing experiences/performances. In this study we examined holistic processing in Chinese character recognition in adults with and without dyslexia, using the complete composite paradigm. Our results showed that the adults with dyslexia recognized Chinese characters with a stronger holistic processing effect than the typical controls. It seems that those with dyslexia relied overly on the visual spatial information of characters and showed deficits in attending selectively to their components when processing Chinese characters, which hindered the development of expert reading and writing skills. This effect was in contrast to previous perceptual expertise studies in which reduced holistic processing marked deficits in face/visual object recognition. This study is also the first to show that Chinese adults with dyslexia had persistent below average performances in Chinese literacy.
... A key initiative for supporting students with reading and writing difficulties was a nine-year intersectoral project, the READ & WRITE: A Jockey Club Learning Support Network, funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities since 2006. With the concerted efforts among the tertiary institutions, the Government, and the community partners, an evidence-based Tiered Intervention Model for Chinese Language Learning for junior-primary schools (Ho et al. 2012;Ho et al. 2014) was adopted by the Education Bureau to run in more than 200 out of the 500 primary schools in Hong Kong. This project clearly demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary and inter-organization collaboration in promoting diversity in education. ...
... Recent studies examining the effectiveness of this model found that Tier 1 support was effective in improving cognitive-linguistic and literacy skills of children. The positive effects were also sustained at the end of Grade 2 Ho et al., 2012). Furthermore, 18 -58 % of students with literacy difficulties in Tier 2 and 7 % students with dyslexia in Tier 3 remedial groups, who initially were below the benchmark, achieved the benchmark of literacy after receiving the intervention for 1 to 2 years . ...
Dyslexia is one of the most common learning difficulties affecting approximately 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China. The education and support needs of primary and secondary students with dyslexia have therefore been of great concern to the community. In the present paper, research into the characteristics of the Chinese language with focus on the cognitive ‐linguistic characteristics, causes, and manifestations of dyslexia are briefly reviewed. Such work could provide the foundation to develop effective evidence‐ based identification, intervention, and support for students with dyslexia both inside and outside of school. Thus understanding the causes and mechanisms underlying dyslexia with reference to the special circumstances of the Chinese milieu allows better informed identification, remedial intervention, support service, and teacher education for further work on research and practice.
... A key initiative for supporting students with reading and writing difficulties was a nine-year intersectoral project, the READ & WRITE: A Jockey Club Learning Support Network, funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities since 2006. With the concerted efforts among the tertiary institutions, the Government, and the community partners, an evidence-based Tiered Intervention Model for Chinese Language Learning for junior-primary schools (Ho et al. 2012;Ho et al. 2014) was adopted by the Education Bureau to run in more than 200 out of the 500 primary schools in Hong Kong. This project clearly demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary and inter-organization collaboration in promoting diversity in education. ...
This introductory article for the special issue of “The International Journal of Diversity in Education” weaves
the research interests and histories of members of the local organizing committee for the Fifteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in July 2015. These members share a common research context—diversity and education in Hong Kong and the article aims to reflect that, although from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and concerns with different sectors and approaches to education, our collective interest centers on education and social justice in Hong Kong. Issues explored in K-12 schooling range across: inclusive education, Chinese language support for special education needs children and non- Chinese speaking (NCS) learners, and multicultural education. ssues explored in higher education focus on the academic workforce in Hong Kong, both in terms of internationalization policy and academic mobility in professional education, and with regard to gender equity and the role of women in the academy.
... This is crucial, as metalinguistic awareness and word-reading skills are malleable and can be improved considerably by appropriate early experiences (e.g., Chen et al., 2009). The findings show the value of compounding awareness as a component of a reading intervention for young Chinese students (e.g., Ho et al., 2012;Wu et al., 2009). Raising compounding awareness in the early grades has the potential to accelerate word reading and reading comprehension in later years, especially for students with a lower initial level of compounding awareness. ...
Using a longitudinal sample of young Chinese students (fall and spring in grades 1 and 2: times 1-4, respectively) and growth curve analysis, this study examined whether the initial status and growth rates of compounding awareness from time 1 to time 4 uniquely contribute to reading comprehension at time 4 and whether word-reading efficiency at time 4 mediates the association between initial status and growth in compounding awareness and reading comprehension at time 4. The results indicated that initial status and growth rates of compounding awareness made a significant direct contribution to reading comprehension at the end of second grade after controlling for IQ, phonological awareness, and vocabulary knowledge. The relationship between initial status and growth rates of compounding awareness and reading comprehension were fully mediated by word-reading efficiency. The findings underscore the importance of growth in compounding awareness for reading comprehension and add to the literature about the nature of the morphological awareness and reading comprehension relationship in Chinese.
... Indeed, previously it was found that L1 Chinese children's vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with word reading (Ho, Wong, Yeung, Chan, Chung, Lo & Luan, 2011;Liu, McBride-Chang, Wong, Tardif, Stokes, Fletcher & Hua, 2010;Pan, McBride-Chang, Shu, Liu, Zhang & Li, 2011), possibly because decoding Chinese words at either the one-character or multiplecharacter level accesses meaning representation to a great extent. Strong vocabulary knowledge provides joint links between semantics and phonology for the Chinese language. ...
... Indeed, previously it was found that L1 Chinese children's vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with word reading (Ho, Wong, Yeung, Chan, Chung, Lo & Luan, 2011;Liu, McBride-Chang, Wong, Tardif, Stokes, Fletcher & Hua, 2010;Pan, McBride-Chang, Shu, Liu, Zhang & Li, 2011), possibly because decoding Chinese words at either the one-character or multiplecharacter level accesses meaning representation to a great extent. Strong vocabulary knowledge provides joint links between semantics and phonology for the Chinese language. ...
We investigated cognitive and metalinguistic correlates of Chinese word reading in children with L2 Chinese learning experience and compared these to those in L1 Chinese speaking children. In total, 102 third and fourth grade children were recruited for the study. We examined a range of Chinese and English word reading related cognitive and metalinguistic skills. Compared to the native Chinese speaking group (NCSS), the non-native Chinese speaking group (NNCS) only performed better in English vocabulary knowledge and English working memory. On Chinese word reading related skills the NNCS group performed significantly worse than the NCS group. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the unique correlates of Chinese word reading for both groups were Chinese vocabulary, working memory, lexical tone awareness, and orthographic skills. For the NNCS group only, visual skills were also unique correlates of word reading skills. The results suggest cognitive similarities and differences in reading among native and non-native Chinese speakers.
... We assessed the understanding of basic word order patterns in Chinese with a word order correction task. The task design was similar to that in previous Chinese literacy research (Chik et al., 2012 ;Ho et al., 2012 ;Yeung et al., 2013 ). Twelve Chinese sentences were selected from locally published Chinese textbooks and exercises designed for grades 1-4 in Hong Kong. ...
The present study examined the roles of different dimensions of syntactic skills in predicting reading comprehension within and across two languages with contrasting structural properties: Chinese and English. A total of 413 young Cantonese-English bilingual students in Hong Kong (202 first graders and 211 third graders) were tested on word order skill, morphosyntactic skill, and reading comprehension in both L1 and L2. Hierarchical regressions showed that after partialing out the effects of age, nonverbal intelligence, working memory, oral vocabulary, and word reading, word order skill was more predictive of reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 in grade 1 than morphosyntactic skill. In grade 3, morphosyntactic skill emerged to be an equally and even a more important skill than word order skill in L1 and L2 reading, respectively. In both age cohorts, L1 syntactic skills cross- linguistically predicted L2 reading comprehension even when age, oral language, and general cognitive skills were statistically controlled. Statistical equation modeling mediation analyses revealed that this syntactic transfer from L1 to L2 was mediated by L2 syntactic skills but not L1 reading comprehension. When we further investigated the transfer of individual syntactic skills, word order skill appeared to be more transferable than morphosyntactic skill early in grade 1, in support of the transfer facilitation model. The findings suggest that young bilingual students may draw on the correspondence between L1 and L2 syntax to support their L2 learning, hence informing educators of issues and strategies that they should take note of in designing an effective L2 learning program.
... The ultimate goal of identification is to facilitate intervention. A recent study reported that training in oral language, morphological awareness, orthographic skills, and syntactic skills were beneficial for children who learned to read Chinese, espe- cially for struggling readers (Ho et al., 2012). A tiered intervention curriculum with these skill components is being implemented in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools. ...
We developed the Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behavior Checklist for Junior Secondary School Students (BCL-JS) for teachers to rate the frequency of 52 reading-related behavioral characteristics of Chinese secondary school students. An item factor analysis based on ratings on 947 students yielded seven distinct dimensions. In a separate sample of 90 students, the seven constructs of the BCL-JS significantly correlated with students’ performances on most literacy and reading-related cognitive measures, and differentiated adolescents with or without dyslexia. Discriminant analysis showed that the BCL-JS had a high rate of correct classification (82.2%). These findings support that the BCL-JS is a reliable screening tool for Chinese junior secondary school students at risk for dyslexia.
This meta-analysis synthesizes 49 standardized mean-change differences between control and treatment groups as effect sizes from 28 independent studies, investigating the efficacy of existing reading interventions on literacy skills for Chinese children. Six potentially important moderators were considered in this study. These moderators included intervention outcome, intervention method, intervention timing, participant type, intervention form, and intervention implementer. Overall, the existing reading intervention significantly impacted Chinese children’s literacy achievement (g = 0.68). Different intervention methods showed somehow different effects on literacy outcomes. Specifically, fluency training (g = 1.78) appeared as the most effective intervention method with a large effect. Working memory training (g = 0.80), phonological training (g = 0.69), orthographic training (g = 0.70), and morphological training (g = 0.66) had significant and medium effects on improving literacy skills of Chinese children. In addition, reading intervention improved literacy skills of older children (g = 0.90) and younger children (g = 0.63) comparably. However, children with dyslexia (g = 0.87) seemed to benefit more than typically developing children (g = 0.49) from reading interventions. Reading interventions seemed to have a better effect on word spelling (g = 0.93) than word reading (g = 0.63). Interventions delivered in group (g = 0.78) seemed to be more effective than interventions delivered individually (g = 0.45). Children gained more from interventions administered by researchers (g = 0.85) or combined implementers (g = 1.11) than by parents (g = 0.27). These findings suggest that appropriate reading interventions are effective and essential for improving the literacy outcomes of Chinese children, but the efficacy might be different depending on the intervention methods, children’s literacy status, outcome measures, and intervention settings.
Ισχυρά εμπειρικά ευρήματα υποδεικνύουν ότι η ανάπτυξη του προφορικού λεξιλογίου στα παιδιά συμβάλλει αποφασιστικά στην αναγνωστική κατανόηση κατά τη διάρκεια της φοίτησής τους στο σχολείο, εξασφαλίζοντας ακριβή κατανόηση του γραπτού κειμένου και αποδοτικότερη αναγνώριση λέξεων. Για την πληρέστερη κατανόηση του τρόπου με τον οποίο η ανάπτυξη του προφορικού λόγου των μαθητών διευκολύνει την πρόσβαση στη γραπτή γλώσσα, τις δύο τελευταίες δεκαετίες η έρευνα έχει εστιάσει –εκτός από το λεξιλόγιο και τη φωνημική επίγνωση- και στη συνεισφορά των μορφολογικών δεξιοτήτων (Deacon, Kieffer & Laroche, 2014· Dickinson et al., 2003· Foorman et al., 2015· Manolitsis et al., 2019· Nagy, Berninger & Abbott, 2006). Στο παρόν κεφάλαιο αναλύεται η συμβολή γλωσσικών και μεταγλωσσικών δεξιοτήτων στη μάθηση του γραπτού λόγου με ειδικότερο στόχο τη διερεύνηση της διαμεσολαβητικής επίδρασης του λεξιλογίου και της μορφολογικής επίγνωσης στη διαχρονική πρόβλεψη της αναγνωστικής κατανόησης. Οι συμμετέχοντες (Ν=570) προήλθαν από τυχαία και διαστρωματωμένη δειγματολοψία σε δημοτικά σχολεία της Κρήτης και της Αττικής και αξιολογήθηκαν ατομικά 3 φορές σε διάστημα 2 ετών με δοκιμασίες λεξιλογίου, μορφολογικής επίγνωσης, ανάγνωσης λέξεων και ψευδολέξεων, αναγνωστικής ευχέρειας και κατανόησης. Η ερευνητική υπόθεση ελέγχθηκε χρήσιμο- ποιώντας ως εξωγενείς μεταβλητές τις μετρήσεις της μορφολογικής επίγνωσης και του λεξιλογίου της πρώτης αξιολόγησης (ανεξάρτητες μεταβλητές), ενώ ως ενδογενείς μεταβλητές τις μετρήσεις της μορφολογικής επίγνωσης και του λεξιλογίου της δεύτερης αξιολόγησης (διαμεσολαβητικές μεταβλητές), καθώς και τη μέτρηση της αναγνωστικής κατανόησης της τρίτης αξιολόγησης (εξαρτημένη μεταβλητή). Από τις αναλύσεις διαδρομής που πραγματοποιήθηκαν προέκυψε ότι η αρχική μορφολογική επίγνωση ασκεί τόσο άμεση, όσο και έμμεση επίδραση στην αναγνωστική κατανόηση των μαθητών, όπως εξετάστηκε δυο χρόνια αργότερα. Επίσης, σημαντική αναδείχθηκε η διαχρονική συμβολή του λεξιλογίου, το οποίο διαπιστώθηκε ότι προβλέπει τη μεταβολή της αναγνωστικής κατανόησης μόνο διαμεσολαβητικά. Η συγκριτική εξέταση των ευρημάτων υποδεικνύει ότι η μορφολογική επίγνωση προβλέπει σε υψηλότερο βαθμό την ανάπτυξη της αναγνωστικής κατανόησης διαμέσου του λεξιλογίου σε σχέση με την πρόβλεψη της αναγνωστικής κατανόησης από το λεξιλόγιο διαμέσου της μορφολογικής επί- γνώσης. Επίσης, οι αναλύσεις διαδρομής πολλαπλών ομάδων έδειξαν ότι το προτεινόμενο μοντέλο δε διέφερε σημαντικά ανάλογα με την ηλικία των μαθητών.
Background
Using a 1‐year longitudinal design, we evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention programme to improve reading attainments among Chinese‐as‐a‐second‐language (CSL) learners. Using the simple view of reading as a theoretical framework, the intervention focused on students' orthographic knowledge, word reading and listening comprehension to facilitate reading comprehension.
Method
A total of 186 Grade 4 CSL students (mean age = 9.22, SD = 0.56) participated in the study and were grouped into the treatment ( N = 96) and control ( N = 90) groups. A range of Chinese language and literacy skills were assessed before and after the intervention.
Results
The path analysis showed that the intervention significantly affected orthographic knowledge, word reading and listening comprehension directly and reading comprehension indirectly through the three componential skills after controlling for nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary and autoregressors.
Conclusions
The findings suggest that orthographic knowledge, word reading and listening comprehension may be promising targets for instructing young CSL learners.
The current study examined the executive function (EF) deficits and their roles in reading in one hundred and four Cantonese-speaking children with typical development, reading disabilities (RD), ADHD, and comorbid ADHD and RD (ADHD + RD). Children's EF and reading skills were measured. Analysis of variance results showed that all children with disorders manifested deficits in verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory and behavioral inhibition. Moreover, children with ADHD and ADHD + RD also exhibited deficits in inhibition (IC and BI) and cognitive flexibility. These findings demonstrated that the EF deficits in Chinese children with RD, ADHD, and ADHD + RD are similar to those in their counterparts using alphabetic languages. However, children with ADHD + RD displayed more severe deficits in visuospatial working memory compared to children with RD and ADHD, which was inconsistent with that observed in children using alphabetic languages. Regression analysis results showed that verbal short-term memory was a significant predictor for both word reading and reading fluency in children with RD and ADHD + RD. Moreover, behavioral inhibition significantly predicted reading fluency in children with ADHD. These findings also agreed with previous studies. Collectively, the results of the current study showed that the EF deficits and their roles in reading found in Chinese children with RD, ADHD, and ADHD + RD are mainly consistent with children using alphabetic languages. However, more studies are still needed to confirm these findings, especially comparing the severity of working memory among these three disorders.
This study examined the contribution of reading motivation to reading comprehension among Chinese elementary children from a self-determination theory perspective. A total of 379 Chinese third to fifth graders were assessed on four types of reading motivation (i.e., external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation and intrinsic motivation), cognitive factors important to Chinese reading comprehension (i.e., verbal working memory, reading fluency and syntactic skills), and reading comprehension. Structural equation modelling analysis results showed that introjected regulation negatively predicted reading comprehension and identified regulation positively predicted reading comprehension. The contribution of identified regulation to reading comprehension was mediated by its contribution to cognitive factors. These results underscore the possible positive association of reading motivation with cognitive factors important to reading comprehension development.
This chapter considers some basic characteristics of the Chinese language and script, and discusses how it is learned in different Chinese‐speaking regions. It points out the cognitive‐linguistic skills that are particularly important for learning to read in Chinese, highlighting implications for the remediation of character and word reading problems. The basic written units of Chinese are characters, which correspond to syllables and usually also to morphemes. Reading development depends on multiple cognitive skills, and it is generally agreed that there are multiple cognitive risk factors for developmental dyslexia in Chinese children and adolescents, some persisting from childhood to young adulthood. Children with dyslexia generally manifest spelling problems that are often more severe and more persistent than their difficulties with reading. The chapter focuses on the development of word recognition skills in Chinese. Interest in specific skills training for Chinese literacy remediation is growing.
Background
Studies have shown that word dictation and syntactic skills are significant predictors of written composition performance among Chinese children in elementary grades. However, there is a paucity of research on the bidirectional relationships between these two cognitive‐linguistic skills (i.e., word dictation and syntactic skills) and Chinese writing skills.
Methods
This paper reports the findings of a 1‐year longitudinal study tracking the developmental patterns of Chinese writing among students in Grades 3 and 5 in Hong Kong. The participants were administered tasks involving cognitive‐linguistic skills (working memory, word dictation and syntactic skills) and writing skills (narrative writing and expository writing).
Results
Multiple regression analysis revealed that word dictation and syntactic skills in Grades 3 and 5 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese written composition performance in Grade 4 and Grade 6. Syntactic skills, but not word dictation, contributed a significant amount of unique variance to writing performance after controlling for the autoregressor effect of writing. The results also showed that written composition performance in Grades 3 and 5 contributed unique variance to individual differences in syntactic skills in Grades 4 and 6, after controlling for syntactic skills in the preceding year and other cognitive‐linguistic variables.
Conclusion
The patterns of results underscore the significance of syntactic skills in Chinese written composition in upper elementary grades and the bidirectional relationship between syntactic skills and written composition in Chinese.
Highlights
What is already known about this topic
• Chinese word dictation, syntactic skills and verbal working memory are the major types of developmental skills important in Chinese writing among children in elementary grades.
What this paper adds
• The longitudinal contribution of word dictation to writing performance across grades was mediated by the contribution of word dictation to concurrent writing performance.
• Syntactic skills contributed a unique amount of variance to writing performance across grades even after controlling for the autoregressor effect of writing.
• The longitudinal relationships between syntactic skills and written composition were bidirectional.
Implications for theory, policy or practice
• An emphasis on grammar teaching in the context of writing may benefit both writing and syntactic skills development.
• Combined word dictation and composing instruction, rather than teaching word dictation alone or composing instruction alone, may enhance composing skills.
This study examined the relationships between writing motivation and written composition performance in Chinese among 388 Chinese children in Grades 3 to 5 in accordance with the framework of self-determination theory. Multiple regression analysis results showed that writing motivation measures (external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation and intrinsic motivation) contributed a unique variance to written composition performance before and after controlling for the contribution of cognitive-linguistic skills important to written composition (i.e., word dictation, working memory and syntactic knowledge). Identified regulation was the only significant predictor of written composition performance. These results are discussed with reference to the impact of Chinese culture on motivation to write among Chinese children.
Dyslexia is a developmental disability affecting the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and its developmental nature makes longitudinal research of great importance. This study therefore investigated the cognitive-linguistic profiles of the typical-functioning dyslexics and high-functioning dyslexics with longitudinal cohorts of Chinese-speaking adolescents diagnosed with childhood dyslexia. These two dyslexic groups of fifty students (with 25 typical-functioning dyslexics) were assessed in Grade 2 (Time 1) and in Grade 8 (Time 2), whereas 25 typically developing controls were assessed at Time 2. Students were administered measures of phonological awareness, morphological skills, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, verbal working memory, and literacy skills. Results showed that, at Time 2, both dyslexic groups performed less well than the control group on most of the measures. Deficits in rapid naming were particularly salient in both dyslexic groups. Comparing the two dyslexic groups, the typical-functioning dyslexics had more multiple deficits than the high-functioning dyslexics. Findings highlight the importance of rapid naming deficits as potential universal causes of dyslexia and the utility of targeting visual-orthographic knowledge and morphological skills in supporting the development of dyslexic adolescents.
This chapter will review universal and unique cognitive-linguistic precursors to reading acquisition and impairment, such as reading disabilities and dyslexia, in the Chinese language. The chapter will examine research evidence linking phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual skills to reading acquisition among children in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Understanding these cognitive-linguistic constructs and their mechanisms underlying reading acquisition is essential in order to explain reading impairment. Compared to dyslexic children of alphabetic languages, Chinese children with dyslexia present different and often multiple profiles of cognitive-linguistic deficits, the most dominant being RAN, orthographic awareness, and morphological awareness and the less dominant being phonological awareness. In particular, the review will examine the causes, characteristics, uniqueness or idiosyncrasies found in speakers of Chinese, and consequences of dyslexia in children in the three Chinese societies. Such a review will offer insight into and lay foundations for developing effective evidence-based interventions for children with reading impairment both inside and outside of school. Implications for current evidence-based practices in interventions are also discussed.
This study explored the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between reading and writing in young Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) learners’ sentence writing, using structural equation modeling. The participants comprised 126 Hong Kong senior primary ethnic minority students, whose literacy skills were assessed at two time points over the course of a year. In grade 5 (Time-1), they were assessed with Chinese character reading and reading comprehension measures to evaluate their reading ability. In grade 6 (Time-2), their sentence reading, sentence writing, and literacy component skills of Chinese character writing fluency and written syntactic skills were assessed. The results demonstrated that students’ reading and writing performances were substantially related both concurrently and longitudinally. Furthermore, (1) at Time-2, the component skills accounted for substantial portions of variance in sentence reading and writing skills, along with the relationship between them, while (2) Time-1 reading ability predicted Time-2 component skills and, through the mediation thereof, indirectly predicted sentence writing. Thus, in light of the linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language, literacy component skills are crucial component processes that connect reading and writing in CSL learners’ sentence writing.
To accomplish effective evidence-based intervention for children with reading disability (RD), it is important to integrate basic and applied research findings and take into consideration some language-specific learning demands. In this chapter, research findings regarding the cognitive profile of Chinese RD are reported and the relevance of the profile for teaching Chinese children with RD is discussed. In particular, a Chinese tiered intervention model with core reading instruction curriculum, which we have developed and implemented in 37 primary schools in Hong Kong, is introduced. This Chinese model has successfully improved the various cognitive skills, literacy skills, and learning motivation of the children in the Program Schools. In particular, 18–58 % of poor readers in Tier 2 and 7 % dyslexic readers in Tier 3 remedial groups, who originally fell below the benchmark, reaching the benchmark of Chinese literacy after receiving the intervention for 1–2 years. Comparing the core reading components in Chinese and the Big Five in English suggests that different cognitive demands are needed for reading diverse orthographies—phonological training is essential for learning to read English, whereas orthographic and morphological training is significant for reading success in Chinese.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss character and word reading in Chinese children as a cognitive and psycholinguistic process within a componential information processing framework. This chapter discusses the role of phonological, orthographic, and morphological components essential to Chinese reading acquisition. The intent is to show cognitive and psycholinguistic processes that are universal to reading different writing systems and those that are specific to reading the morphosyllabic Chinese.
In this study, a system was developed to offer adaptive remedial instruction materials to learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The Chinese Listening and Speaking Diagnosis and Remedial Instruction (CLSDRI) system integrated computerized diagnostic tests and remedial instruction materials to diagnose errors made in listening comprehension and speaking. To test the CLSDRI system, 65 CFL students were recruited from the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University to participate in an experiment. The results indicated that the CLSDRI system made a greater positive impact on the experimental group (EG) participants' listening comprehension and oral language proficiency compared with the control group's (CG) use of computerized diagnostic tests combined with paper-based remedial instruction materials. Moreover, the experiment revealed two interesting findings related to the effectiveness of the CLSDRI system: (1) immediate and adaptive remedial instruction materials improved the EG participants' proficiency in listening comprehension and speaking and (2) there were fewer differences in listening comprehension and speaking abilities between the Sinosphere participants who resided in a Chinese population and were influenced by Chinese culture and the non-Sinosphere participants. These findings support the effectiveness of computer-assisted language learning.
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.
As far as academic reading comprehension is concerned, a network of linguistic skills and strategies operate in a complex and integrated matter. Since it is impossible to examine all the factors affecting reading comprehension all at once, it is more reasonable to compare and contrast the predictive effects of specific variables against each other and elicit the role of each of them in determining academic performance. For this reason, the present study aims to investigate whether specifically the depth of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness or metacognitive awareness was a more powerful predictor of academic reading comprehension. 45 students from the English Language Teaching Department in an English-medium foundation university in Turkey participated in the study. The results of multiple regression analysis revealed that with a sample of homogenous first language (L1) background learners, depth of vocabulary knowledge was not a strong predictor of academic reading comprehension for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. However, it was found that syntactic awareness was a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension in second language (L2) and of the investigated variables, metacognitive reading strategies have much to contribute to academic reading comprehension.
A study was carried out to determine whether knowledge of the internal radical structure of a Chinese character helps a naïve learner to memorize that character. Four groups of Australian subjects who knew nothing about Chinese were asked to learn 24 character/meaning pairs (e.g., Pa-CHEW). Each character was composed of two radicals taken from a set of 16. Every subject was presented with the set of character-meaning pairs three times and then were given each character alone and asked to recall the meaning associated with it. Before seeing any characters, one group (Radicals Before) told about radicals and had 15 minutes to learn the set of 16 radicals thoroughly. Another (Radicals Early) was told about radicals at the first presentation of the stimuli, but were simply asked, as each character was presented, to point out on a chart its component radicals. A third group (Radicals Late) did the same thing, but at the third presentation of the stimuli; while a final group (No Radicals) were told nothing about radicals at all. It was found that memory for the character-meaning pairings was best for the Radicals Early group, suggesting that it is important to highlight the radicals when a character is first presented to the learner.
Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experi- ment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners qtiickly acquired knowledge about the orthographic structure of the characters. With only limited vo- cabulary and without explicit instruction, they were sensitive to the characters' cur- riculum frequency and internal compositional features. Overall, these results were consistent with our previous findings (Wang, Perfetti. & Liu. 2003), The second ex- periment further tested the learners' implicit and explicit learning of the orthographic component function of Chinese characters. In an offline unknown character identifi- cation task, these learners showed difficulty in making use of the functional cue of the known semantic radical without any probing. However, with probing they identi- fied visually the majority of target semantic radicals. In addition, they demonstrated implicit knowledge of the meaning cue of the semantic radical by making more ap- propriate meaning inferences on high-frequenc y radicals than on low-frequency ones. After receiving explicit instruction, the students extracted significantly more meaning information from known semantic radicals, particularly low-frequency ones, compared to their performance prior to such instruction.
Two studies investigating the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading development are reported in this paper. Study 1 examined the semantic radical knowledge of 20 Grade 1, 20 Grade 3, and 20 Grade 5 Chinese children in Hong Kong. It was found that various types of semantic radical knowledge, including the position and semantic category of semantic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading and sentence comprehension. Study 2 examined phonetic radical knowledge with another three groups of 20 Chinese children in Grades 1, 3, and 5 respectively. It was found that various measures of phonetic radical knowledge, including the function and sound value of phonetic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading. These studies found that, developmentally, the children started acquiring the knowledge of character structure, position, semantic category, and sound value of radicals from about Grade 1. However, they did not understand that the function of semantic radicals is to provide meaning cues in reading until Grade 3. The authors concluded that the radical is an important orthographic processing unit in reading development in Chinese.
Project RIME, Reading Instructional Methods of Efficacy, is an interactive, collaborative professional development project designed to support early elementary and special education teachers as they integrate more explicit instruction for children at risk for reading failure into their curricula. Two components of the model are described: the interactive course and the yearlong school collaboration. This article focuses on 11 teachers from two schools and compares them to teachers from two other schools. Several evaluations, including measures of teachers' attitudes and knowledge, are described. Results indicate that although teachers became more positive and knowledgeable toward using explicit instruction, their orientation toward implicit, whole-language approaches remained stable. In contrast, teachers' attitudes and knowledge in the comparison schools were unchanged. Results from student performance are also summarized. The perceptions of 3 teachers were explored further using qualitative data analysis techniques. Implications for professional development are discussed.
A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described. The model consists of sets of orthographic and phonological units and an interlevel of hidden units. Weights on connections between units were modified during a training phase using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model simulates many aspects of human performance, including (a) differences between words in terms of processing difficulty, (b) pronunciation of novel items, (c) differences between readers in terms of word recognition skill, (d) transitions from beginning to skilled reading, and (e) differences in performance on lexical decision and naming tasks. The model's behavior early in the learning phase corresponds to that of children acquiring word recognition skills. Training with a smaller number of hidden units produces output characteristic of many dyslexic readers. Naming is simulated without pronunciation rules, and lexical decisions are simulated without accessing word-level representations. The performance of the model is largely determined by three factors: the nature of the input, a significant fragment of written English; the learning rule, which encodes the implicit structure of the orthography in the weights on connections; and the architecture of the system, which influences the scope of what can be learned.
Two unique measures of morphological awareness, along with other reading-related tasks, were orally administered to 100 kindergarten and 100 2nd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. These morphological awareness tasks were developed on the basis of 2 special properties of Chinese: (a) the relatively large number of homophones requires speakers to distinguish unique meanings in syllables with identical sounds, and (b) complex vocabulary words are often built from 2 or more previously learned morphemes. Both tasks of morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Chinese character recognition in these children, after controlling for age, phonological awareness, speeded naming, speed of processing, and vocabulary. Developmentally, both tasks of morphological awareness improved with age. Results demonstrate that morphological awareness is uniquely important for early Chinese character recognition.
This study is an investigation of the contribution of morphological awareness in Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition. Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were administered to test children's skills in morphological awareness, phonological awareness, oral vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension. The results showed that after the effect of Chinese-based predictors had been accounted for, English morphological awareness of compound structure still contributed to variance in both character reading and reading comprehension in Chinese. This finding indicates a cross-language morphological transfer in acquisition of two distinct writing systems. The transfer from English L2 to Chinese L1 is due to the bilingual children's rapidly increasing English L2 skills in their primary school years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tasks representing 9 cognitive constructs of potential importance to understanding Chinese reading development and impairment were administered to 75 children with dyslexia and 77 age-matched children without reading difficulties in 5th and 6th grade. Logistic regression analyses revealed that dyslexic readers were best distinguished from age-matched controls with tasks of morphological awareness, speeded number naming, and vocabulary skill; performance on tasks of visual skills or phonological awareness failed to distinguish the groups. Path analyses further revealed that a construct of morphological awareness was the strongest consistent predictor of a variety of literacy-related skills across both groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may be a core theoretical construct necessary for explaining variability in reading Chinese.
There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary breadth, depth of vocabulary knowledge, decoding, visual word recognition, and reading comprehension. Concurrent analyses revealed that each distinct reading skill was related to the vocabulary measures in a unique manner. Receptive vocabulary breadth was the only oral vocabulary variable that predicted decoding performance after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. In contrast, expressive vocabulary breadth predicted visual word recognition, whereas depth of vocabulary knowledge predicted reading comprehension. The results are discussed in terms of interrelations between phonological and semantic factors in the acquisition of distinct reading skills.
A simple view of reading was outlined that consisted of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension, both held to be necessary for skilled reading. Three predictions drawn from the simple view were assessed in a longitudinal sample of English-Spanish bilingual children in first through fourth grade. The results supported each prediction: (a) The linear combination of decoding and listening comprehension made substantial contributions toward explaining variation in reading comprehension, but the estimates were significantly improved by inclusion of the product of the two components; (b) the correlations between decoding and listening comprehension tended to become negative as samples were successively restricted to less skilled readers; and (c) the pattern of linear relationships between listening and reading comprehension for increasing levels of decoding skill revealed constant intercept values of zero and positive slope values increasing in magnitude. These results support the view that skill in reading can be simply characterized as the product of skill in decoding and linguistic comprehension. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the simple view for the practice of reading instruction, the definition of reading disability, and the notion of literacy.
Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) were for many years treated as distinct disorders but are now often regarded as different manifestations of the same underlying problem, differing only in severity or developmental stage. The merging of these categories has been motivated by the reconceptualization of dyslexia as a language disorder in which phonological processing is deficient. The authors argue that this focus underestimates the independent influence of semantic and syntactic deficits, which are widespread in SLI and which affect reading comprehension and impair attainment of fluent reading in adolescence. The authors suggest that 2 dimensions of impairment are needed to conceptualize the relationship between these disorders and to capture phenotypic features that are important for identifying neurobiologically and etiologically coherent subgroups.
A synthesis of the extant research on reading interventions for students with reading difficulties and disabilities in fourth and fifth grade (ages 9-11) is presented. Thirteen studies with treatment/comparison study designs and eleven single group or single subject studies were located and synthesized. Findings from the 24 studies revealed high effects for comprehension interventions on researcher-developed comprehension measures. Word recognition interventions yielded small to moderate effects on a range of reading outcomes. Few studies were located implementing vocabulary and multi-component interventions.
This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.
This study evaluated the role of metalinguistic awareness in learning to read Chinese. Reading ability depends not only on children’s basic abilities to comprehend and use language (i.e., linguistic knowledge) but also on metalinguistic knowledge. According to our theory, two facets of metalinguistic awareness important for learning to read Chinese are phonological awareness and morphological awareness. To evaluate this theory, batteries of test were developed and administered to representative samples of first- and fourth grade students. The tests assessing phonological awareness consisted of syllable reversing, onset deletion, final deletion and tone judgment. The tests to assess morphological awareness were radical awareness, morpheme awareness and homographic awareness. The tests to assess reading comprehension were character knowledge, syntactic awareness, cloze completion, sentence reading, pinyin reading, and story reading. Altogether data was collected from 400 first-grade and 400 fourth grade students in ten average-level primary schools. Structural equation models and communality and uniqueness analysis confirmed that morphological awareness and phonological awareness are important in learning to read Chinese, and second, that morphological awareness is the more important of the two
The present study was conducted to examine the cognitive profile and multiple-deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia, Thirty Chinese dyslexic children in Hong Kong were compared with 30 average readers of the same chronological age (CA controls) and 30 average readers of the same reading level (RL controls) in a number of rapid naming, visual, phonological, and orthographic tasks, Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA controls but similarly to the RL controls on most of the cognitive tasks. The rapid naming deficit was found to be the most dominant type of cognitive deficit in Chinese dyslexic children. Over half of the dyslexic children exhibited deficits in 3 or more cognitive areas, and there was a significant association between the number of cognitive deficits and the degree of reading and spelling impairment, The present findings support the multiple-deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia.
The SAGE Handbook of Dyslexia is a comprehensive overview of a complex field. It is a rich, critical assessment of past and present theory and current research, which also looks to the future. The editors have brought together key figures from the international academic world - both researchers and practitioners - to examine the relationships between theoretical paradigms, research and practice, and to map new areas of research.
A4-year longitudinal study was conducted to examine the relationship between Chinese children's phonological skills and their success in reading. Initially, 100 Hong Kong Chinese children were tested on visual and phonological skills at the age of 3, before they could read. The findings showed that prereading phonological skills significantly predicted the children's reading performance in Chinese 2 and 3 years later, even after controlling for the effects of age, IQ, and mother's education. The main reason for this relationship is that phonological knowledge helps children to use the phonetic component in Chinese characters.
Children's natural learning of word meanings while reading was investigated in a study involving 447 American and Chinese children in third and fifth grades. The children read one of two cross-translated stories and then completed a test on the difficult words in both the story they read and the one they did not read. The results showed significant incidental learning of word meanings in both grades in both countries. In each country, incidental word learning appeared on both easy and difficult test questions and among children of all levels of ability. For children from both cultures, the strength of contextual support in the stories and the conceptual difficulty of the words affected learning. The morphological transparency of words influenced word learning among Chinese fifth graders, but not among American children in either grade. Considering the many differences between China and the United States in language and culture, the results imply that incidental acquisition of word meanings while reading is a universal in written language development. /// [Spanish] En un estudio realizado con 447 niños estadounidenses y chinos de tercero y quinto grado se investigó el aprendizaje natural del signficado de palabras durante la lectura. Los niños leyeron una de dos historias traducidas y posteriormente completaron una prueba sobre las palabras difíciles, tanto de la historia que habían leído como de la que no habían leído. Los resultados mostraron un significativo aprendizaje incidental de los significados de las palabras en ambos grados en los dos países. En cada país, el aprendizaje incidental de palabras se manifestó en las preguntas fáciles y difíciles de la prueba y entre niños de todos los niveles de habilidad. La fuerza del soporte contextual de las historias y la dificultad conceptual de las palabras afectó el aprendizaje de los niños de ambas culturas. La transparencia morfológica de las palabras influenció el aprendizaje de palabras entre los niños chinos de quinto grado, pero no afectó a los niños estadounidenses de ninguno de los dos grados. Si se consideran las múltiples diferencias lingüísticas y culturales entre China y Estados Unidos, los resultados implican que la adquisición incidental de los significados de palabras durante la lectura es un universal del desarrollo del lenguaje escrito. /// [German] Das natürliche, automatische Wortbedeutungslernen von Kindern beim Lesen wurde in einer Studie mit 447 amerikanischen und chinesischen Kinder aus der dritten und fünften Klasse untersucht. Die Kinder lasen eine von zwei jeweils in die andere Sprache übersetzten Geschichten und füllten dann einen Test aus, in dem nach schwierigen Wörtern in beiden, der gelesenen und der ungelesenen Geschichte, gefragt wurde. Die Ergebnisse zeigten signifikantes Nebenbeilernen von Wortbedeutungen in beiden Klassen und beiden Ländern. In jedem Land war das zufällige Wortlernen sowohl in einfachen als auch schwierigen Fragen wie auch bei Kindern unterschiedlichster Befähigung zu beobachten. Bei Kindern beider Kulturen beeinflußte die Deutlichkeit der Erklärungen im Kontext der Geschichten und die begriffliche Schwierigkeit der Wörter den Lerneffekt. Die morphologische Durchsichtigkeit hatte Wirkung auf das Wortlernen bei chinesischen Fünftklässlern, jedoch nicht bei amerikanischen Kindern. Betrachtet man die vielen sprachlichen und kulturellen Unterschiede zwischen China und Amerika, legen die Ergebnisse nahe, daß das Nebenbeilernen von Wörtern beim Lesen eine Universalie der schriftsprachlichen Entwicklung ist. /// [French] On a étudié l'apprentissage naturel du sens des mots pendant la lecture chez 447 enfants américains et chinois de troisième et cinquième année. Les enfants ont lu une des deux histoires traduite dans l'autre langue, puis ont répondu à un test portant sur des mots difficiles de l'histoire qu'ils avaient lue et de l'histoire qu'ils n'avaient pas lue. Les résultats ont montré l'existence d'un apprentissage incident significatif du sens des mots aux deux niveaux scolaires et dans les deux pays. Dans chaque pays, un apprentissage incident des mots est apparu pour les questions faciles et difficiles et à tous les niveaux de maîtrise des enfants. Pour les enfants des deux cultures, l'apprentissage a été affecté par la force du support contextuel des histoires et par la difficulté des mots. La transparence morphologique des mots a joué un rôle sur l'apprentissage des mots chez les enfants chinois de cinquième année, mais pas chez les enfants américains à quelque niveau que ce soit. Compte tenu des multiples différences de langue et de culture entre la Chine et l'Amérique, les résultats impliquent que l'acquisition du sens des mots pendant la lecture est un universau dans le développement de la langue écrite.
Development of three component skills in reading Chinese was examined in primary school children in Hong Kong. Feature analysis skills, syntax knowledge, and semantic analysis skills were found to differ in their contribution to reading proficiency at different grades. Visual processing skill was not at all a good predictor for reading proficiency, but the phonological access skill was important in predicting children's reading proficiency before grade three. It was an ineffective predictor beyond grade three. Skill in semantic analysis, on the other hand, was insignificant as a predictor at younger grades but it became an important predictor after grade two. Syntax knowledge was an important predictor of reading proficiency in the first grade and remained a significant predictor of reading proficiency right up to grade six. The present data support the idea that some preliminary component processes of reading may become automatic with increasing experience in reading and that this automatization of component processes will leave more resource capacity for higher-order analyses. Chinese reading shares much in common with English reading in terms of the component processes involved at different stages of reading proficiency.
To clarify the role of decoding in reading and reading disability, a simple model of reading is proposed, which holds that reading equals the product of decoding and comprehension. It follows that there must be three types of reading disability, resulting from an inability to decode, an inability to comprehend, or both. It is argued that the first is dyslexia, the second hyperlexia, and the third common, or garden variety, reading disability.
We describe a model of inservice training for regular and special education teachers at the kindergarten through fourth-grade level, with a focus on updating teachers on recent research developments in preventing and treating reading and writing disabilities and on translating this knowledge into classroom practice. The model includes a summer teacher training institute, three follow-up sessions during the school year, and ongoing observation and consultation in teachers' classrooms. The effectiveness of the model has been demonstrated in measures of teacher knowledge, classroom practice, and student learning outcome in comparisons with control teachers who have not received training. This article focuses on (a) the domain knowledge teachers are taught that relates to understanding the processes of reading and writing acquisition and instructional approaches for reading and writing, (b) the importance of forming researcher-teacher partnerships in which teachers become the experts in translating research knowledge into classroom practice, and (c) the transformations we observed in teachers as they evolved in their level of knowledge and then in their teaching practices.
This study was designed to examine the relevance of some cognitive skills to Chinese reading and to identify those that distinguish readers of different proficiency levels. Third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children were given two sets of tests, the Chinese Reading Proficiency Test and five component skill tests. Skills in word recognition and in comprehension were examined through tasks measuring component detection, lexical coding, memory for gist, knowledge of syntax, and use of context. Subjects' responses on the knowledge of syntax task and the lexical coding task were found to be most effective in predicting reading proficiency of the third graders, but not the fourth- and fifth-grade children. Instead, use of context task was the best predictor of the older children's reading proficiency.Le but de la prénte étude a été d'examiner la pertinence, dans la lecture du Chinois. d'un certain nombre de capacités cognitives et d'identifier celles qui permettent de différencier les lecteurs possédant différents niveaux de compétence. Les sujets provenaient de trois groupes (3ème, 4ème, et 5ème années). Il leur a été présentés deux ensembles de tests: Test de Compétence dans la lecture du Chinois d'une part, Tests d'évaluation de la capacité à discerner les composants d'autre part. Les capacités de reconnaissance des mots et de compréhension ont été examinées à travers cinq exercices différents: la détection des composants, le codage lexical, la mémorisation du contenu, la connaissance de la syntaxe et l'usage du contexte. Les résultats obtenus par les sujets dans les cxercices relatifs à la connaissance de la syntaxe et au codage lexical se sont révélés les meilleurs pour prédire le degré de compétence dans la lecture pour les élèves de 3ème année, mais pas pour les enfants de 4ème et 5ème année. Dans ce dernier as, l'exercice portant sur l'usage du contexte a été reconnu come le meilleur instrument de prédiction.
Chinese is well-known for its impoverished system of grammatical morphology. This study examines how, in the absence of inflections, Chinese speakers employ other types of cues in real-time sentence interpretation. A reaction time technique was designed to tap into the role of word order, noun animacy, the object marker ba, the passive marker bei, and the indefinite marker yi. Results show the following hierarchy of cue strengths in Chinese: passive marker bei > animacy > word order > object marker ba > indefinite marker yi. The fact that the semimorphological markers (ba and bei) are intercepted by semantic (noun animacy) and syntactic (word order) cues in this strength hierarchy shows that cues are not necessarily grouped together by linguistic type (e.g., morphology > order vs order > morphology). Complex interactions among cue types were observed in both the decision and the reaction time data, reflecting principles of competition and convergence. These findings are compatible with interactive activation models of sentence processing (e.g., the Competition Model), while posing problems for models that assume a modular architecture in which morphological, semantic, and syntactic sources of information are insulated from one another at various points in parsing and interpretation. Finally, reaction time data reveal aspects of processing that are often not available in results from choice response measures, attesting to the usefulness of reaction time studies at the sentence level.
This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of "Mandarin Chinese", the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.
We provide an overview of the role professional development plays in multitiered prevention and intervention models. Specifically, professional development is discussed within the context of establishing sustainable improvement in schools as professionals implement multitiered models of prevention and intervention services, programs, and practices related to response to intervention. We discuss the system capacity for sustainable improvement and system-wide procedures that can be implemented to support multitiered prevention models. We also discuss various models, levels of professional development, and the relationship between professional development implementation and sustainability of school improvement. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges schools are likely to face in establishing response to intervention. We also note what preservice and in-service professional development activities can offer to help overcome some of these challenges and barriers to system-wide change in quality prevention and intervention programs. (Contains 4 tables.)
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in conjunction with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act amendments of 2004 (IDEA) have created incentives to improve how K-12 instruction is provided and to improve the achievement of all students, including those with disabilities. To reach these goals, however, a thorough research base is needed, practitioners and administrators must be provided with training in how to use this research effectively in practice, and systems must be put in place to support practitioners and administrators in implementing and sustaining the use of evidence-based practices in schools. An emerging framework that provides an infrastructure to support the use of evidence-based practices and provides a model for instructing and intervening on behalf of all students to help improve their achievement is response to intervention (RTI). Although the RTI framework holds this potential, many practical questions need to be answered for practitioners and administrators to proceed successfully in its full implementation. The article in this issue by Kratochwill, Valopiansky, Clements, and Ball (2007), which both lays out the key components of a system of RTI as it should be implemented in an education setting and sets the framework for the series of articles in this special issue, states: "Successful implementation of RTI is multifaceted and involves knowledge of evidence-based interventions, multitiered intervention models, screening, assessment and progress monitoring, administering interventions with a high degree of integrity, support and coordinated efforts across all levels of staff and leadership within the school, and sustaining systems of prevention grounded in an RTI framework." For each of these components the authors describe the salient issues, current research, and next steps needed to ensure the use of valid and reliable evidence-based practices within a system responsive to students' education needs and supportive of practitioners' implementation. The results of research are not useful if practitioners are not sufficiently trained in their use. In addition, this training is unlikely to occur in a high-quality, supported way without changing the systems within which schools work and without building capacity to support practitioners in their implementation. Thus, in this article, the authors reflect on professional development and building the capacity necessary for sustained implementation, and address current research needs for the RTI model.
The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed.
discuss how children learn to read and what processes are centrally involved / draws attention to the importance of distinguishing between the process of learning to read, the process of skilled reading, and the process of reading instruction / describes a model of the proximal causes of individual differences in reading comprehension performance / provides a conceptual framework that specifies the relationships between the learning tasks, learning strategies, and cognitive prerequisites of beginning literacy development / summarizes research on the relationship between metalinguistic abilities and learning to read / presents a cognitive-developmental model of metalinguistic development and reading acquisition (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tasks of speeded naming, phonological awareness, word identification, nonsense word repetition, and vocabulary, along with two measures of morphological awareness (morphological structure awareness and morpheme identification), were administered to 115 kindergartners and 105 second graders. In the combined sample, 48% of the variance in vocabulary knowledge was predicted by the phonological processing and reading variables. Morphological structure awareness and morpheme identification together predicted an additional unique 10% of variance in vocabulary knowledge, for a total of 58% of the variance explained; both measures of morphological awareness were uniquely associated with vocabulary knowledge. Results underscore the potential importance of different facets of morphological awareness, as distinct from phonological processing skills, for understanding variability in early vocabulary acquisition.
This study investigated Chinese dyslexic children’s efficiency in employing phonological strategies (i.e. the use of orthography-phonology correspondence rules) in reading and the effectiveness of training phonological strategies in improving Chinese dyslexic children’s reading performance. An Experimental Group of 15 Chinese dyslexic children received a five-day intensive training in phonological strategies while a comparable Control Group did not. The results showed that Chinese dyslexic children did not use the phonological strategies as efficiently as Chinese average readers, and the training programme was effective in significantly improving the Experimental Group’s reading performance. This suggests that Chinese dyslexic children can benefit from training in phonological strategies.
We tested Chinese-English bi-scriptal fourth-graders on reading aloud and comprehension in Chinese and English and their understanding of some structural principles underlying Chinese orthography. These principles concern phonological and semantic representation in written Chinese. Regressions showed that knowledge about phonological representation predicted reading aloud in both Chinese and English. Understanding of semantic representation predicted reading comprehension only in Chinese. To explain these findings, we argue that although young readers find it natural to interpret orthography as representation of sound in either script, looking for broad meaning cues in orthography is more spontaneous in Chinese than English reading. The present findings support the notion that children generally attempt to extract as much phonological and semantic information as possible directly from print in reading, although in many situations, such information provides only very rough cuing on word pronunciation and meaning.
Two studies, comprising training in phonological analogy and semantic analogy with pre- and post-training assessments, were conducted to investigate whether young children made orthographic analogies in learning to read a nonalphabetic script, Chinese, as alphabetic readers do. Twenty Chinese first-graders and 20 third-graders participated in each of the studies. The results showed that not only the third-graders, but also the first-graders made phonological analogies by the phonetic (i.e. the orthographic component in a Chinese character that provides sound cues) and semantic analogies by the radical (i.e. the orthographic component that provides meaning cues). It was, therefore, suggested that the roles and functions of the phonetics and radicals could be taught explicitly in school from an early age to help improve children's reading skills.
Whereas many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in a morphemic orthography such as Chinese. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic and syntactic skills in Chinese. The participants were 196 grade 1 to grade 4 Chinese children in Hong Kong. A word recognition task in Chinese was developed and children who scored in the lowest quartile were classified as poor readers. The children were administered phonological tasks (tone and rhyming discrimination), semantic tasks (choosing similar words and sentences meanings), a syntactic task (oral cloze), and a working memory task. The results showed that word recognition was highly correlated with phonological skills and semantic processing, and was only moderately related to syntactic knowledge and working memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills with the most significant problems at the phonological and semantic levels. Phonological skills are important to the acquisition of reading skills in both Chinese and English.
The development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English was investigated in the current study involving 412 Taiwanese and 256 American students in second, fourth, and sixth grades. The results from both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students indicate that the morphological awareness develops with grade level and is strongly related to reading ability. More proficient readers outperformed less proficient readers when asked to (1) recognize morphological relationships between words, (2) discriminate word parts having the same or different meanings, (3) select the best interpretations of low-frequency derivatives and compounds composed of high-frequency parts, and (4) judge the well-formedness of novel derivatives and compounds. Chinese students' acquisition of derivational morphology seems to lag behind that of compounding rules, which might reflect the nature of Chinese word formation in that there are far fewer derivatives than compounds in Chinese.
Preparing special educators who are knowledgeable about evidence-based interventions for teaching reading to students with
reading difficulties and who are capable of using curriculum-based assessments to monitor student progress and differentiate
interventions is vital to the success of current school reform efforts. The primary purpose of this exploratory study was
to examine the effect of tutoring and using assessment to monitor the progress of struggling readers on preservice teachers’
(PSTs’) knowledge and preparedness to teach reading. Also of interest was whether reading scores of tutored students improved.
PSTs (n=18) in an undergraduate reading methods course tutored at-risk second graders using an evidence-based intervention and
monitored students’ progress weekly. PSTs made significant growth on a measure of teacher knowledge about the structure of
language and on a survey of their preparedness to teach reading. A qualitative analysis of PSTs’ weekly reflections and final
reports revealed that the majority used curriculum-based assessment data to describe students’ response to tutoring and were
beginning to use that data to make instructional decisions. On average, tutored students improved reading fluency, but did
not demonstrate significant growth in reading relative to national norms. Implications and limitations of the study are described
and directions for future research are discussed.
ABSTRACTS
A total of 292 Chinese children in the first, third, or fifth grade participated in one of two experiments investigating radical awareness ; that is, the insight that a component of Chinese characters, called the radical, usually provides information about the character's meaning. The technique used in the experiments was to present two‐character words familiar from oral language but which the children had not seen before in print. One of the characters was written in Pinyin, the alphabetic system that Chinese children learn in the first 2 months of first grade. The children's task was to select a character to replace the Pinyin. The first experiment showed that third graders and fifth graders were able to select characters containing the correct radicals even when the characters as a whole were unfamiliar to them, which must mean that they were aware of the relationship between a radical and the meaning of a character. The second experiment showed that children were better able to use radicals to derive the meanings of new characters when the radicals were familiar and the conceptual difficulty of the words was low. Children rated as good readers by their teachers displayed more awareness of radicals than children rated as poor readers.
Un total de 292 niños chinos de primero, tercero o quinto grado participó en uno de dos experimentos que investigaron la conciencia de los radicales ; es decir la comprensión de que un componente de los caracteres chinos, llamado el radical, generalmente proporciona información acerca del significado del carácter. La técnica utilizada en los experimentos consistió en presentar palabras de dos caracteres, familiares en la lengua oral, pero que los niños no habían visto escritas. Uno de los caracteres fue escrito en Pinyin, el sistema alfabético que los niños chinos aprenden en los primeros dos meses de primer grado. La tarea de los niños fue seleccionar un carácter para reemplazar el Pinyin. El primer experimento mostró que los niños de tercero y quinto grado fueron capaces de seleccionar caracteres que contenían los radicales correctos, aún cuando los caracteres como totalidad no les eran familiares, lo que sugiere que eran conscientes de la relación entre un radical y el significado de un carácter. El segundo experimento mostró que los niños se desempeñaron mejor utilizando los radicales para derivar los significados de caracteres nuevos cuando los radicales eran familiares y la dificultad conceptual de las palabras era baja. Los niños considerados buenos lectores por los docentes demostraron más conciencia de los radicales que los niños considerados malos lectores.
Eine gruppe von insgesamt 292 Kindern der ersten, dritten oder fünften Schulstufe nahm an einem von zwei Experimenten zur Erforschung des etymologischen Bewußtseins teil; darunter ist die Einsicht zu verstehen, daß ein Bestandteil eines chinesischen Schriftzeichens, nämlich das sinnbildliche Wurzelelement, Radikal genannt, gewöhnlicherweise Informationen zur Bedeutung des Wortzeichens enthält. Die Vorgangsweise, die bei den Experimenten angewendet wurde, war, Wörter mit zwei Schriftzeichen zu präsentieren, die den Kindern vom mündlichen Sprachgebrauch her vertraut waren, aber deren Druckbild sie zuvor noch nicht gesehen hatten. Eines der Schriftzeichen war in Pinyin geschrieben, dem alphabetischen System, das Kinder in den ersten zwei Monaten auf der fünften Schulstufe lernen. Die Aufgabe der Kinder war es, ein Bildzeichen herauszufinden, das das Pinyinzeichen ersetzt. Das erste Experiment zeigte, daß die Kinder der dritten und fünften Schulstufe imstande waren, jene Schriftzeichen auszuwählen, die das richtige Radikal enthielten, auch wenn das Schriftzeichen als Ganzes ihnen unbekannt war, was die Schlußfolgerung nahelegt, daß ihnen die Beziehung zwischen einem Radikal und der Bedeutung eines Zeichens bewußt ist. Das zweite Experiment zeigte, daß die Kinder besser imstande waren, die Bedeutungen von neuen Schriftzeichen abzuleiten, wenn ihnen die Radikale vertraut waren und der Schwierigkeitsgrad in der Sinnerfassung niedrig war. Jene Kinder, die von ihren Lehrern als gute Leser eingestuft wurden, zeigten mehr Bewußtsein für die sinnbildlichen Wurzelelemente als sogenannte schlechte Leser.
Un total de 292 enfants de 1°, 3°, et 5° année ont participé à l'une ou l'autre de deux expériences portant sur la conscience du radical , à savoir l'intuition qu'une composante des caractères chinois, que l'on appelle le radical, apporte généralement une information sur la signification du caractère. La technique utilisée dans ces expériences a consisté à présenter des mots de deux caractères, connus à l'oral, mais que les enfants n'avaient jamais vus à l'écrit. Un des deux caractères était écrit en pinyin, le système alphabétique que les enfants chinois apprennent dans les deux premiers mois de la 1° année. La tâche des enfants consistait à sélectionner un caractère substituable au pinyin. La première expérience a montré que les enfants de 3° et 5° année étaient en mesure de sélectionner des caractères contenant les radicaux corrects, même quand les caractères dans leur ensemble ne leur étaient pas familiers, ce qui signifierait qu'ils étaient conscients de la relation entre un radical et la signification d'un caractère. La seconde expérience a montré que les enfants étaient plus en mesure d'utiliser des radicaux pour en déduire les significations des nouveaux caractères quand les radicaux étaient familiers et que la difficulté conceptuelle des mots était faible. Les enfants considérés comme de bons lecteurs par leurs maîtres ont manifesté une plus grande conscience des radicaux que les enfants considérés comme de mauvais lecteurs.
This study investigated the extent to which language skills at ages 2 to 4 years could discriminate Hong Kong Chinese poor from adequate readers at age 7. Selected were 41 poor readers (age M = 87.6 months) and 41 adequate readers (age M = 88.3 months). The two groups were matched on age, parents' education levels, and nonverbal intelligence. The following language tasks were tested at different ages: vocabulary checklist and Cantonese articulation test at age 2; nonword repetition, Cantonese articulation, and receptive grammar at age 3; and nonword repetition, receptive grammar, sentence imitation, and story comprehension at age 4. Significant differences between the poor and adequate readers were found in the age 2 vocabulary knowledge, age 3 Cantonese articulation, and age 4 receptive grammar skill, sentence imitation, and story comprehension. Among these measures, sentence imitation showed the greatest power in discriminating poor and adequate readers.