Table Of ContentCHINESE CHILDREN'S
READING ACQUISITION
Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues
CHINESE CHILDREN'S
READING ACQUISITION
Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues
edited by
Wenling Li
Janet S. Gaffney
Jerome L. Packard
University ofI llinois at Urbana-Champaign
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4613-5274-7 ISBN 978-1-4615-0859-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-0859-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress.
Copyright © 2002 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002
AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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DEDICATION
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We dedicate this book to the children, teachers, and school officials in
Beijing,who have contributed to ourresearchon early literacy instruction,
and to all of the childrenand their parents and teachers in the People'sRepublic
of China,who may benefit from this work in the future.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
PartI: TheoreticalPerspectivesonLearningtoRead
Chapter1. CurrentIssues inLearningtoReadChinese 3
Ovid1.L.Tzeng
Chapter2. Children's EarlyUnderstandingofWriting andLanguage:
The Impact ofCharactersandAlphabeticOrthographies 17
Kevin F.Miller
Discussion:TranslationsandTransitionsinLearningtoRead31 31
HoucanZhang
Part11: RoleofmetalinguisticawarenessinChinese reading
Chapter3. PhonologicalAwarenessinChinese Reading 39
Insup Taylor
Chapter4. The RoleOfMorphologicalAwarenessinLearningtoRead Chinese 59
WilIiamE.Nagy,Amy Kuo-Kealoha,XinchunWu,Wenling Li,RichardC.
Anderson,andXiChen
Chapter5. FacetsofMetalinguisticAwarenessthat ContributetoChineseLiteracy 87
Wenling Li, Richard C. Anderson,WilIiamNagy,Houcan Zhang
Discussion:MetalinguisticAwarenessasaCriticalConstruct 107
Jerome L.Packard
PartIll: Wide readingand the development ofChinese literacy
Chapter6. Book-BasedProgramsinDevelopingCountries I15
Warwick B.Elley
Chapter7. Shared-BookReading inChina 131
RichardC.Anderson,Janet S.Gaffney,Xinchun Wu,Chiung-ChuWang,
WenlingLi,Hua Shu,WilIiamE.Nagy,XiaojieMing
Chapter8. MorphologicalInstructionandTeacherTraining 157
XinchunWu,Richard C.Anderson,Wenling Li,XiChen,XiangzhiMeng
Chapter9. Children'sLiteratureinthePeople's Republic ofChina:ItsPurposes
andGenres 175
BelindaYun-YingLouie,DouglasH.Louie
Discussion: SupportingtheReadingInstructionandLearningofChineseChildren 195
RebeccaBarr
PartIV: FactorsinHome Literacy
Chapter10.The RoleofHome-LiteracyEnvironmentinLearningtoReadChinese 207
Hua Shu, Wenling Li,RichardAnderson,Yu-MinKu,XuanYue
Chapter 11.Writing SystemsandLearningtoRead inaSecond Language 225
Keiko Koda
Discussion:VariablesAssociatedwithLearningtoRead inChinese 249
Erica McClure
AuthorIndex 257
SubjectIndex 263
PREFACE
We are pleased to contribute this body of work to the research
literature on learning to read and write in non-alphabetic languages. Our
intent has been to provide a critical investigation and discussion ofthe major
issues relevant to learning to read Chinese, a language whose writing system
isvastly different from writing systemsthat are normally investigated. While
many works over the past two decades have addressed important issues of
language processing by adult speakers of Chinese, the present effort is the
first to focus on the acquisition ofreading by Chinese children. One ofour
goals has been to examine issues involving classroom instruction in addition
to theory and basic research, with an eye toward stimulating discussion that
would beofusetothose interestedintheoretical aswellasapplied issues. The
combined perspectives of contributors from psychology, linguistics,
psycholinguistics, East Asian studies,reading, and education have provided a
rich and textured resource base from which we were to draw for a
comprehensivediscussionofthistopic.
This book is the culmination of a conference sponsored by the
Spencer Foundation entitled Learning to Read Chinese that was held at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August, 1999. International
researchers from multiple disciplines came together to present and discuss
scholarly papers, providing opportunities for productive and lively
interchanges by experts on the acquisition of Chinese. The chapters in this
book represent a selection of presentations from that conference that the
authors revised with the benefit ofthe interactive discussions that took place
amongtheparticipants.
The volume is organized around four themes: Theoretical
Perspectives in Learning to Read, Role of Metalinguistic Awareness in
Chinese Reading, Wide Reading and the Development of Chinese Literacy,
and Factors in Home Literacy. Each section includes chapters related to the
designated theme followed by a critical response to the chapters offered by a
scholarwithexpertise inthe area.
TheoreticalPerspectives in Learningto Read
Thesectionon theoretical perspectives presumes that learning to read
is fundamentally a task of hypothesis testing and implementation, in which
the child must first realize that print represents speech, and then work out the
details ofhow that representation is instantiated. Grasping the nature ofthe
speech/print relationship requires figuring out which units of language are
represented by the elements of the writing system. A child would make only
scant progress in learning to read without first understanding whether the
x
marks on a page represent phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, or
something else. The development ofmetalinguistic awareness-the ability to
identify, reflect on, and manipulate language forms-represents a critical
stage in the acquisition of reading. After facets of metalinguistic awareness
related to different features of language are defined and measured, the
relationship between those measures and progress in reading acquisition can
bedetermined.
TheRole ofMetalinguisticAwareness in ChineseReading
The section on metalinguistic awareness assumes that the facets of
metalinguistic awareness that are likely to be important will most likely
depend upon the nature of the writing system. In the case of Chinese,
morphological awareness should be pivotal, since characters-the basic
elements of the Chinese writing system-map onto morphemes. Thus,
Chinese is based on a fundamentally different principle from alphabetic
writing systems suchasEnglish, inwhich letters,the basic unitsofthe writing
system, map on to phonemes, the basic units of speech. As phonemic
awareness iscritical for learning to read English, the parallel argument is that
morphological awarenesswill becritical for learningto readChinese.
Wide Readingand the DevelopmentofChineseLiteracy
The role that volume ofreading plays in the acquisition of literacy
was chosen as one ofour themes because of previous findings showing that
extensive reading influences children's fluency and reading comprehension.
Oneofthe major benefits ofa largevolume ofreading confirmed in research
outside of China isthat a large volume ofreading results ina rapid growth in
vocabulary knowledge. Given that most Chinese schools rely upon the
method ofintensively studying a small number ofshort texts to teach reading
skills, there was reason to suspect that an intervention that succeeded in
promoting extensive reading might have positive effects on reading
acquisition inChina.
Factors in HomeLiteracy
Of the many factors that contribute to the differences in children's reading
achievement, instruction at school and children's language and reading
ability undoubtedly have a major influence on reading achievement. Another
source that has also been reported as an important influence on children's
readingachievement isfamily or homesupport. We focusedon four different
facets ofhome literacy environment-literacy resources in the home, parent
child literacy related activities, children's literacy related performance, and
parents' education-to gauge the extent to which these factors, in addition to
xi
factors such as dialect differences, affects children's acquisition of primarily
Mandarin-based literacy.
Chapters 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 report the results ofa year-long study of
literacy instruction in Beijing elementary schools. The study evaluated two
instructional interventions, one to promote morphological awareness, the
otherto increasevolume ofreading. The640 students involved inthis project
wereenrolled in 16first-and fourth-grade classrooms from fourschools. Two
ofthe schools serve areas in which most families are well educated and have
technical or professional jobs, while the other two schools serve areas in
which most families are less well educated and have jobs as skilled or
unskilled workers. In order to investigate possible causal relationships among
variables associated with literacy in Chinese, the research group created a
battery of assessment instruments to measure morphological awareness,
phonological awareness, visual perception, syntactic awareness, vocabulary,
reading comprehension, and home factors in literacy. Perhaps these
measurement tools will contribute in some small, but hopefully significant
way,toeducational andpsychological measurement inChina.
It is our hope that our efforts will have international appeal for
researchers, educators, and teacher educators, and that investigators in the
areas of educational, child, and cognitive psychology, linguistics,
psycholinguistics, and Asian and international studies will find that our
findings relate to their work. We also hope that practitioners and educational
researchers inreading andteacher education will findthe information derived
from our multicultural approach applicable in their particular contexts. Our
goal was to contribute to international comparative studies of literacy by
elucidating the features of the Chinese culture, language, writing system, and
pedagogical approaches that affect the acquisition of literacy. Finally, we
hope to raise the status of educational inquiry among educational researchers
who focus on this critical area oflearning to read Chinese-an endeavor that
potentially affects25% ofthe world's readers.
Wenling Li
Janet S.Gaffney
JeromeL. Packard
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We offer our deepest thanks to the authors for contributing their
research to this book. We are grateful to the discussants for their insightful
comments and productive suggestions. Thanks to Merle Levy for invaluable
help in editingthe manuscriptand to Xi Chen for format editing.
The Spencer Foundation has provided generous support for our
literacy research in the People's Republic of China. Research reported in
Chapters4,5, 7,8, and 10was made possiblethrough grants to the University
of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign, ill addition, the Spencer Foundation
sponsored the Conference on Learning to Read Chinese at the University of
lllinois at Urbana-Champaign that was the foundation for this book.
Part I
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING
TO READ
