Orthographic Knowledge Important in Comprehending Elementary Chinese Text by Users of Alphasyllabaries

The Contribution of Radical Knowledge and Character Recognition to L2 Chinese Reading Comprehension

Although there have been extensive theoretical discussions on the various component skills needed in comprehending texts in L2 English and L1 Chinese, empirical investigations on the component skills of L2 Chinese are scarce. This study attempts to fill in this gap by investigating the direct and indirect contributions of two lower-level latent component skills, radical knowledge and character recognition, to L2 Chinese passage-level reading comprehension. Radical knowledge was measured by a Receptive Semantic Radical Knowledge Test and a Semantic Radical Meaning Matching Test. Character recognition was assessed by a Lexical Decision Test and a Character Knowledge Test. Two tests, a Multiple-choice Test and a Cloze Test, were adopted to measure textual reading comprehension. The data were collected from 209 learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). Radical knowledge was found to have a significant direct effect on character recognition and significant indirect effect on L2 Chinese reading through the mediation of character recognition. Character recognition was found to have a significant direct effect on reading comprehension. Taken together, this study suggests the importance of lower-level character and sub-character component skills to L2 Chinese reading.

Lexical Orthographic Knowledge Mediates the Relationship Between Character Reading and Reading Comprehension Among Learners With Chinese as a Second Language

Reading in Chinese is complex because readers should not only recognize characters by basic units (i.e., characters) but also integrate characters into words when reading text. While many efforts have been devoted to investigating the effect of sub-lexical orthographic knowledge in Chinese character reading, less is known about the role played by lexical orthographic knowledge at word level. A total of 424 secondary learners with Chinese as a second language (CSL) in Hong Kong were assessed with character reading, reading comprehension, and two lexical orthographic knowledge tasks: lexical orthographic choice (OKC) and lexical orthographic choice in context (OKCC). Path analysis results demonstrated that these lexical orthographic skills significantly mediated the effect of character reading on comprehension, in which OKCC was a more critical mediator as its mediating effect was bigger than that of OKC. Further analyses showed that these mediating effects were significant only among students with richer learning experience (i.e., learning Chinese for 4 years or above). Our results illustrate the possible trajectory of CSL learners’ literacy development from character reading to reading comprehension and provide pedagogical implications for teaching and learning.

Measuring Orthographic Knowledge of L2 Chinese Learners in Vietnam Using a Handwriting Task - A Preliminary Report

In the current study, the orthographic knowledge required for writing Chinese characters was assessed among participants with L1 Vietnamese background who learn Chinese as a foreign language. A total of 42 undergraduates were recruited. They were invited to participate in a delayed Chinese character copying task consisting of 32 characters. Their Chinese character reading abilities were also obtained using a character naming task. All the tests were conducted online during the pandemic in 2021. Results indicated that the participants' accuracy in the copying task was affected by the familiarity of the characters and the number of strokes of the characters. These effects minimized as reading performance increased. In the inter-stroke interval (ISI) analysis, results indicated a significant boundary effect where ISIs between orthographic units were longer than ISIs within orthographic units, showing the participants' tendency to chunk Chinese characters into functional units when they write. Only high achievers in the reading task demonstrated the use of both large and small grain-size units in writing (i.e., radical-boundary ISI > logographeme-boundary ISI > non-boundary ISI), while the low achievers only used small grain-size units in their writing. We suggest that the delayed copying task incorporated with handwriting measures is an effective method to assess orthographic knowledge of L2 Chinese learners.

Developmental Relations Between Listening and Reading Comprehension in Young Chinese Language Learners: A Longitudinal Study

The reciprocal influences between the development of Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) listening and reading comprehension among young learners in Hong Kong were evaluated using a 2-year, three-wave longitudinal design. A total of 129 senior primary CSL students were assessed using listening and reading comprehension tests at the end of grades 4, 5, and 6. An autoregressive, cross-lagged model was specified, and it accounted for a substantial portion of variance (more than 60%) in the two comprehension abilities by grades 5 and 6. Path analysis showed that the two comprehension abilities facilitated each other's development across the years: on controlling for their respective strong autoregressive effects, the two comprehension abilities predicted a unique, substantial variance portion of each other every year. In addition, based on previous studies conducted on readers of both alphabetic languages and Chinese, this study argues the following points: (1) the development of CSL students' reading comprehension is constrained by their listening comprehension, and (2) the acquisition of Chinese literacy skills may promote students' listening comprehension by enhancing their linguistic knowledge and awareness.

Reading Comprehension and Metalinguistic Knowledge in Chinese Readers: A Meta-Analysis

Metalinguistic knowledge has a facilitative effect on reading comprehension. This meta-analysis examined the relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and reading comprehension among Chinese students. By focusing on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension performance, this study synthesized 46 studies with 73 independent samples that represented 10,793 Chinese students from primary school to university levels. We found that in both Chinese and English scripts' reading, morphological awareness had the strongest correlation with reading comprehension, whereas both phonological awareness and orthographical skill had a similar medium correlation with reading comprehension. All three metalinguistic knowledge, which was not significantly influenced by the selected moderators of grade group, area, language type, and assessment, had an independent correlation with reading comprehension. The results suggested that reading stages did not significantly impact the function of metalinguistic knowledge on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension for Chinese students. In addition, for Chinese students, morphological awareness plays a more important role than phonological awareness and orthographical skill in both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension.

Are poor Chinese text comprehenders also poor in written composition?

We studied the performance in three genres of Chinese written composition (narration, exposition, and argumentation) of 158 grade 4, 5, and 6 poor Chinese text comprehenders compared with 156 good Chinese text comprehenders. We examined text comprehension and written composition relationship. Verbal working memory (verbal span working memory and operation span working memory) and different levels of linguistic tasks-morphological sensitivity (morphological compounding and morphological chain), sentence processing (syntax construction and syntax integrity), and text comprehension (narrative and expository texts)-were used to predict separately narrative, expository, and argumentation written compositions in these students. Grade for grade, the good text comprehenders outperformed the poor text comprehenders in all tasks, except for morphological chain. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed differential contribution of the tasks to different genres of writing. In particular, text comprehension made unique contribution to argumentation writing in the poor text comprehenders. Future studies should ask students to read and write parallel passages in the same genre for better comparison and incorporate both instructional and motivational variables.