Yu-Min Ku

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.

Chinese children's concept of word

In written Chinese, words are not separated by spaces, which may make parsing text into words difficult. The concept of word, a metalinguistic term meaning awareness that words have lexicalized meanings and certain structural properties, may be important in learning to read Chinese, helping readers distinguish the words in texts. Second-graders, fifth-graders, and college students in Taiwan completed a word parsing task in which they circled the words in strings of characters. Results showed improvement with age in the ability to distinguish two features of words, meaningful versus nonsense and lexicalized versus nonlexicalized. Performance on the word parsing task was correlated with reading comprehension and was predicted by constraints on the position characters occupy within words, character co-occurrence frequency, and especially whether a character combination has a lexicalized meaning. The study suggests that even second graders are aware of core properties of words, although the concept of word continues to develop as children acquire literacy experience.

The relationship between bilingual experience and the development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness: a cross-linguistic study of classroom discourse

This study aims to examine the relationship between bilingual experience and childrens development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness. To capture both universal and language-specific bilingual effects, the study included four groups of participants: English-speaking children from a general education programme, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking children from a Spanish–English dual-language programme, and Chinese-speaking children from a Chinese–English dual-language programme. Findings from the analyses of teacher talk and measures of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness show that certain aspects of morphological awareness, such as the ability to decipher derived words, were likely to be affected by both instruction and cross-language transfer, while others, such as cognate awareness, appeared to develop through mere exposure to two languages despite the absence of explicit instruction. Furthermore, morpho-syntactic awareness was mostly enhanced through greater emphasis on explicit instruction of morpho-syntactic knowledge; such effect was moderated by the syntactic complexity of teacher talk. These findings suggest that instead of typological distances of the languages, a constellation of factors uniquely characterises bilingual classroom experiences. The linguistic complexity of teacher talk and instructional emphasis may influence childrens development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness.

The Effects of Note-Taking Skills Instruction on Elementary Students’ Reading

ABSTRACT The authors investigated the effects of a 5-week note-taking skills instructional program on note-taking and reading comprehension performance of elementary students. The participants included 349 fourth-grade students from 2 elementary schools in Taiwan. The Note-Taking Instruction group received approximately 40 min of note-taking skills instruction per week for 5 weeks in contrast to the free note-taking group and the free-recall writing group who did not receive any instruction. A note-taking evaluation task and a comprehension test were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction on students’ performance in note taking and reading comprehension, respectively. The study yielded 2 findings: first, teaching students a note-taking strategy significantly improved their performance in note taking and reading comprehension, and second, poor readers showed the greatest gains in note-taking skills with instruction.

Young children's metacognition in the context of telling a written story

This study examines young childrens metacognition in the context of telling a written story. The participants were 36 children: 12 preschoolers, 12 kindergarteners, and 12 first graders in a kindergarten and a nearby elementary school in a northwestern city in Taiwan. Each child was asked to ‘read’ a 13-page wordless picture book and tell a story that will be transcribed for others to read. Once each child finished telling the story, the scribe asked whether the child wished to revise it; the childrens revisions were taken as indicative of metacognitive abilities. Results indicate that 33 out of 36 children demonstrated metacognition as they revised their stories. A significant difference with regards to the accuracy of the revisions was found among the three groups of children, with first graders producing significantly more accurate revisions than did the preschoolers. The implications for future research and practices for teachers are discussed.

Reader, Word, and Character Attributes Contributing to Chinese Children’s Concept of Word

ABSTRACT Concept of word—the awareness of how words differ from nonwords or other linguistic properties—is important to learning to read Chinese because words in Chinese texts are not separated by space, and most characters can be productively compounded with other characters to form new words. The current study examined the effects of reader, word, and character attributes on Chinese children’s concept of word in text. A total of 164 fifth-grade Chinese children participated in this study. Concept of word was measured by children’s lexical decisions about words and nonwords embedded in strings of characters. Cross-classified multilevel logistic models showed that reader attributes, including reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness, interacted with certain word or character attributes in predicting children’s lexical decisions about words or nonwords. This study sheds light on the complex relationships between reader, word, and character attributes in the formation of concept of word in Chinese.

The relationship between input and literacy and metalinguistic development: A study with Chinese–English bilinguals

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between input and literacy/ metalinguistic development in bilingual children. Participants included fourth-grade Chinese-English bilinguals from Taiwan and the USA. The two groups were comparable in socioeconomic status, non-verbal IQ, and the amount of literacy instruction in Chinese and English, but the bilingual participants from Taiwan had more exposure to Chinese and less exposure to English outside of school than their US counterparts. A battery of standardized and researcher-developed measures of literacy and metalinguistic skills were administered in English and Chinese. Results showed that, in general, the greater the amount of input, the more superior the linguistic/metalinguistic development. However, advantages associated with input appeared to be offset by a more balanced bilingual experience on measures that assessed higher levels of metalinguistic awareness. In addition, hierarchical regression analyses showed that morpho-syntactic awareness made a unique contribution to reading comprehension beyond that by vocabulary and morphological awareness only among the participants in Taiwan. The findings make several noteworthy contributions to research on input among bilingual learners. Firstly, the present study highlights the importance of recognizing the variations of bilinguals who speak the same pair of languages, and the impact of linguistic input outside of the school context on language and literacy development in academic settings. Secondly, findings from the present study call for a broader conceptualization of the relationship between input and linguistic/metalinguistic development, and underscore the importance of examining how input may impact the relationship of linguistic and metalinguistic variables. Finally, the present study highlights the need to re-conceptualize input. Indicators of input should go beyond to the quantity or quality of exposure to the assessed language, and be expanded to include the degree of balance in both languages.