Yau-Kai Wong’s research while affiliated with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and other places

Understanding the microstructure and macrostructure of passages is important for reading comprehension. What cognitive-linguistic skills may contribute to understanding these two levels of structures has rarely been investigated. The present study examined whether some word-level and text-level cognitive-linguistic skills may contribute differently to the understanding of microstructure and macrostructure respectively. Seventy-nine Chinese elementary school children were tested on some cognitive-linguistic skills and literacy skills. It was found that word reading fluency and syntactic skills predicted significantly the understanding of microstructure of passages after controlling for age and IQ; while morphological awareness, syntactic skills, and discourse skills contributed significantly to understanding of macrostructure. These findings suggest that syntactic skills facilitate children's access of meaning from grammatical structures, which is a fundamental process in gaining text meaning at any level of reading comprehension. Discourse skills also allow readers to understand the cohesive interlinks within and between sentences and is important for a macro level of passage understanding.

This study investigated the relationships between different types of family resilience and various specific forms of family crisis. In recent decades, numerous studies have examined how people manage crisis and how resilience is developed to overcome periods of chaos and disruption. Most of these studies look only at individual cases, or focus on general concepts, theories, or fundamental frameworks addressing the basic interaction between resilience and crisis. This study uses the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response model (Paterson, 1988) and the Family Strength Index (Orthner et al., 2003) to measure how family resilience relates to different kinds of family crisis. The results show that of the 6 types of family strength which comprise general family resilience, only economic, problem-solving, and family cohesion strength significantly predicted participants’ level of confidence in managing family crisis. Such a discrepancy from the findings of previous work may be explained by cultural factors, which are further discussed in this article.

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 longitudinal predictive power of four important reading-related skills (phonological skills, rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness) to Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) was examined in a 3-year longitudinal study among 251 Chinese elementary students. Rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness assessed in Grade 1 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading in Grades 1 to 4. As for word spelling, rapid naming was the only significant predictor across grades. Morphological awareness was a robust predictor of word spelling in Grade 1 only. Phonological skills and orthographic skills significantly predicted word spelling in Grades 2 and 4. After controlling for autoregressive effects, morphological awareness and orthographic skills were the significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading and word spelling, respectively. These findings reflected the impacts of the Chinese orthography on children's reading and spelling development.

The relationships of reading-related skills (rapid naming, morphological awareness, syntactic skills, discourse skills, and verbal working memory) and word reading to reading comprehension were examined among 248 Chinese fourth graders in Hong Kong. Multiple regression analysis results showed that syntactic skills (word order knowledge, morphosyntactic knowledge), discourse skills (sentence order knowledge) and verbal working memory contributed significant unique variance to reading comprehension after word reading was controlled for. Path analysis results showed that syntactic skills, discourse skills and verbal working memory had significant direct effects on reading comprehension, while rapid naming and morphological awareness had indirect effects on reading comprehension through word reading. These findings, in part, support the models of reading comprehension developed for alphabetic writing systems, but also reflect the unique Chinese language learning experience of Chinese children in Hong Kong.

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.

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