Wenling Li

Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children

Chinese is often referred to as a single language, but it actually consists of a group of related but different languages. Mandarin is the official national language and also the home language of people living in Beijing and other parts of north China. Cantonese is spoken mainly in the Guangdong province in southeastern China and surrounding areas, including Hong Kong. Cantonese has its origin in ancient Chinese and has a lot of similarities with Mandarin in grammar, phonology, and lexicon. But over the centuries, Cantonese and Mandarin have evolved to be almost mutually unintelligible. Children speaking different Chinese languages attend Mandarin immersion programs as soon as they enter primary school. They learn to speak and read Mandarin in Chinese language class, and they receive instruction in other subjects in Mandarin. The primary purpose of the study was to compare the development of phonological awareness among Cantonese-speaking children in Guangzhou and Mandarin-speaking children in Beijing. Another purpose was to explore the nature of phonological awareness in Chinese. As far as we know, this was the first study of its kind.

Reading Instruction in China.

This paper describes and analyzes the school reading and language arts curriculum and significant features of classroom instruction in Chinese primary schools. Reading instruction across China tends to be uniform, because of the national curriculum guide, national textbook series, and common traditions of schooling. Curriculum goals for the primary school include learning approximately 3000 Chinese characters. The load of new characters is greatest in the lower grades. Drill-and-practice predominates in the teaching of characters. Chinese reading instruction emphasizes intensive reading, but neglects extensive reading. According to this analysis, there are at least three promising directions for improving reading instruction in China: (1) explaining the internal structure of Chinese characters and words; (2) increasing the volume of reading; and (3) teaching reading in a manner that leads more children to understand that problem solving is essential in reading.

Morphological Awareness and Chinese Children's Literacy Development: An Intervention Study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese childrens literacy development. Of the 169 children from elementary schools in Beijing, China, who participated in the study, about half received enhanced instruction on the morphology of characters and words in the first and second grade. At the beginning of second grade and at the beginning of third grade, children were tested on morphological awareness, reading, and writing. The results showed that morphological instruction substantially improved childrens performance on the morphological awareness and literacy measures. The best-fitting structural equation models suggested a unidirectional causal relation in early second grade and a reciprocal relation in early third grade between morphological awareness and childrens literacy development.

Learning to See the Patterns in Chinese Characters

Chinese childrens visual representation of characters was tracked with two tasks. The Delayed Copy Character Task required children to reproduce different types of characters and noncharacters after each had been briefly presented. The Detect Component Task required children to find different types of components embedded in sets of characters. Experiment 1 showed that by late first grade some children are aware of the internal structure of Chinese characters and are beginning to encode characters in terms of units representing major character components. Experiment 2 involved children from the second and fourth grade, as well as children early in the first grade, and more refined versions of the perceptual tasks. The finding again was that major components of characters, and even subcomponents that do not represent semantic or phonological information, function as units of character perception. The ability to see characters in terms of constituent units is acquired gradually over the early elementary school years and is correlated with vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and teachers rating of reading level.

Development of Phonological Awareness in Bilingual Chinese Children

This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset awareness task in grade one, but the difference disappeared in higher grades. However, their performance on the rime and tone awareness tasks was better in Mandarin. These results reflect the phonological structure of the two languages: Mandarin has a more complex onset system, whereas Cantonese has more complex tone and rime systems. Moreover, children’s phonological awareness increased faster in Mandarin, which likely resulted from Mandarin instruction. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that onset-rime awareness is a universal construct, whereas tone awareness is a language-specific construct.

A cross-language perspective on learning to read

Contents: Preface. A. McKeough, M. Jarvey, Developing Literacy: Themes and Issues. Part I: Improving School-Based Literacy Development. I. Lundberg, The Childs Route Into Literacy: A Double-Track Journey. T. Nicholson, How to Avoid Reading Failure: Teach Phonemic Awareness. M. Pressley, K. Hilden, Teaching Reading Comprehension. R.C. Anderson, W. Li, A Cross-Language Perspective on Learning to Read. Part II: Literacy Development Beyond the School Walls. D.E. Alvermann, Struggling Adolescent Readers: A Cultural Construction. H.S. Gosse, L.M. Phillips, Family Literacy in Canada: Foundation to a Literate Society. M. Hamilton, Understanding the Everyday: Adult Lives, Literacies, and Informal Learning. Part III: Changing Literacy Practices. S.M. Ng, Literacy and Diversity: Challenges of Change. I. Seda-Santana, Literacies Within Classrooms: Whose and for What Purpose? M.W. Kibby, D. Dechert, Lessons From the Reading Clinic.This book presents an account of literacy learning based on what effective teachers and learners actually do. It demonstrates how literacy develops in social and communicative exchanges. Learning to be literate - like all learning - involves negotiating meanings with others, through whom learners clarify, confirm and expand their understandings of literacy and how they can use it. This approach demands a focus on learning itself, rather than on the alleged complexity of written language. Failure to learn is due to failure in communication and this book establishes a framework to enhance the understandings required of children learning to read. The book draws on videotaped research during literacy sessions in Australian schools and is designed primarily for primary teachers. It will also interest academics and teacher educators.

The role of tone awareness and pinyin knowledge in Chinese reading

Previous literature has established that tone awareness is significantly related to reading development in young children (age 3–6 years) across Chinese-speaking societies. To date, no study has been conducted to explicitly examine how tone awareness contributes to reading at the intermediate level of primary schooling, or the relationship between tone awareness and pinyin instruction, a demonstrated booster for phonological awareness in Chinese children. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between tone awareness and pinyin proficiency, and the contribution of each construct to Chinese reading among 8- to 9-year-old children in Mainland China. Experiment 1 compared the relative contribution of tone awareness and pinyin proficiency to Chinese reading, and Experiment 2 explored the contribution of tone sensitivity to Chinese reading after controlling for rapid naming. Results showed that tone awareness was the only significant predictor of Chinese sentence reading when entered with onset awareness and pinyin proficiency measures (Experiment 1); and that tone awareness continued to be a unique contributor to Chinese sentence reading after controlling for speed naming measures (Experiment 2). This study provides important empirical evidence for the critical role of tone awareness in Chinese reading in intermediate-level primary school children.