An Investigation on Cognitive-Linguistic Skills of English-Chinese Bilingual Learners with and without Dyslexia in Singapore

This thesis investigates dyslexia and the cognitive-linguistics skills, namely phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, morphological awareness and rapid naming, of bilingual learners in Singapore whose first language is English and second language is Chinese. The two main research aims are to investigate whether the English-Chinese bilingual learners with dyslexia diagnosed only in English are weaker than their typical counterparts in reading and all cognitive-linguistic skills in both languages or either language, and to investigate which cognitive-linguistic skills are strong predictors of reading in each language. Results show that the bilingual learners with dyslexia performed significantly poorer than their typical counterparts in reading and all cognitive-linguistic skills in both languages, although their dyslexia were diagnosed only in English. Results also found all English cognitive-linguistic skills predictive of English word reading, especially the unique predictive roles of morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge after rapid naming and phonological awareness were controlled. However, only rapid naming and morphological awareness were found to be predictive of Chinese word reading. The results suggest that dyslexia may manifest differently in reading and cognitive-linguistic skills of English and Chinese languages in the English-Chinese bilingual learners, based on the two different predictive models with different empirically and theoretically supported orders of cognitive-linguistic skills as predictors for reading development in the two languages. The difference in the unique contributions of the four cognitive-linguistic skills underlying the reading development of both languages may suggest the difference lies in language structure and instruction. Keywords: dyslexia, bilingualism, English reading, Chinese reading, cognitive-linguistic skill

Developmental changes in the role of different metalinguistic awareness skills in Chinese reading acquisition from preschool to third grade

Copyright @ 2014 Wei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.National Natural Science Foundation of China and Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Emergent Literacy and Early Reading Skills in Chinese-Mandarin: Evidence from Kindergarten and First-Grade Children

The development of emergent literacy, a precursor to formal reading, has been linked to subsequent conventional literacy skills in Chinese children. The factors important for acquiring Chinese reading skills, such as phonological and morphological awareness, have primarily been studied in primary school children rather than preschoolers. The complete picture of factors contributing to early reading skills in Mandarin-speaking Chinese preschool children remains unclear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool and early school-aged children and investigate the connections between them to address gaps in existing literature. Methodology: A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from a sample of 66 children, including 35 in their second year of kindergarten and 31 first-grade children. Assessments were conducted on phonological awareness (syllable deletion), morphological awareness (lexical compounding, homophone judgment, and homophone generation), orthographic awareness (character judgment), vocabulary, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of numbers. Reading outcomes were measured by character naming and word recognition. Results: The MANOVA findings showed a significant grade group effect on all measures, except for RAN accuracy. Specifically,first-grade children outperformed second-year kindergarten children in syllable deletion, lexical compounding, homophone generation, homophone judgment, character judgment, and vocabulary. Additionally, first-grade children named numbers faster than kindergarten children in RAN. The correlation and regression analyses suggest that advanced emergent literacy skills in children improve word reading, but the associations between emergent literacy and reading vary by grade level. Syllable deletion and lexical compounding are particularly important for kindergarten children at the initial stage of learning to read, while character judgment plays a prominent role in the reading development of primary school children. Homophone judgment develops early and expands progressively as children gain reading experience during their primary school years. The significance of homophone generation is minimal at preschool and early school ages. RAN response time may provide more informative insights than RAN accuracy, and the link between RAN and reading skills appears to weaken once children begin schooling. Additionally, maternal education level was a significant co-variate associated with character naming in preschool children. Implications: Findings carry implications for Chinese educators and parents. Incorporating metalinguistic awareness into classroom instruction can support children’s early reading development. Moreover, parents are encouraged to foster a literacy-rich home environment through experiences like interactive reading and character recognition, especially for preschool children without formal literacy instructions. Further longitudinal research is recommended to predict early reading skills in a larger sample of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers and establish age-specific educational goals

Optimizing the Learning Order of Chinese Characters Using a Novel Topological Sort Algorithm

We present a novel algorithm for optimizing the order in which Chinese characters are learned, one that incorporates the benefits of learning them in order of usage frequency and in order of their hierarchal structural relationships. We show that our work outperforms previously published orders and algorithms. Our algorithm is applicable to any scheduling task where nodes have intrinsic differences in importance and must be visited in topological order

Ghanaian Chinese Language Learners’ Perception of Chinese Characters

This paper investigated students’ perception of learning Chinese characters at the University of Ghana. The Chinese writing system is an exclusive indispensable script that forms part of the Chinese culture. However, the complexity, forms, strokes, pronunciation, radicals, and orthography structure of the characters makes it difficult for Ghanaian students to learn the Chinese language. A qualitative and quantitative design was used for the study. Of 338 students, 183 participated in the study from the first to the fourth year. Purposive sampling was used to select the students to respond to the questionnaire and share their opinions about the Chinese characters in interviews. The findings showed that (a) reading and writing of the Chinese characters were perceived to be more difficult than speaking. (b) the Chinese character radicals, forms, remembering of strokes, orders, numbers, and the orthography structure of the Chinese characters were a hurdle for Chinese language learners. Suggestions were made to urge students to cultivate the habit of consistently practicing the characters through collective participation and learning. The language learners need to do away with excuses, fear, and make-believe obstructions and spend more time in the learning process to enhance their skills in the Chinese writing system

Increasing Chinese Character Recognition Using Incremental Rehearsal with a Morphological Component

In Chinese language learning, knowledge of character- and word- morphology has facilitated learning to read and write Chinese characters. Furthermore, the implementation of Incremental Rehearsal with a morphological component (IRM) has been found to effectively increase children’s Chinese character recognition. This study investigated the effects of IRM as an intervention in increasing Chinese character recognition for three level 3 Chinese language learners (ages 9-12) in a non-profit school, using an A-B single case design. The results indicated that the implementation of the IRM successfully contributed to increasing Chinese character recognition for all three participants. In addition, there was an upward trend in the data for each participant from baseline to the IRM intervention phase. Findings revealed no overlapping data for two participants and 83% non-overlapping data for one participant between baseline and intervention, indicating a functional relationship between implementation of IRM and character recognition increase. Therefore, the IRM was an effective intervention to increase Chinese character recognition

The History of Language Planning and Reform in China: A Critical Perspective

In traditional studies of language policy in China, scholars mainly try to evaluate language policy’s effectiveness in attaining goals such as national unity, economic development, and illiteracy reduction. Few people question the underlying framework of such language planning. This paper tries to call into question those basic assumptions. By adopting a critical theory perspective, this paper tries to locate the origin of the current language policy in China in its historical context and argues that the foundation for current Chinese language policy can be tracked back to colonialism: the framework of the current language policy is based on a Eurocentric model as part of a broader project of governmentality and the current simplified Chinese script is partially a colonial invention

Second language education context and home language effect: language dissimilarities and variation in immigrant students’ outcomes.

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as age and home language can be used in the teaching environment to predict and examine the development outcomes of SL students in verbal reasoning and vocabulary tasks. Hundred and six Portuguese participants, SL learners, between 8 and 17 years old, were assessed in vocabulary frequency, verbal analogies and morphological extraction tasks. In alphabetic languages (Romance languages), immigrant students (in a SL learning situation) with a strong linguistic distance (a home language with a very different orthographic foundation) are expected to struggle in language learning in spite of being aware of strategies that can improve their skills. The storage and combination of morphemes can be a demanding task for individual speakers at different levels. Cognitive mapping is strongly based on linguistic features of L1 development. Results show that home language, not age, was a significant predictor of variation in student’s outcomes. Speakers of alphasyllabary languages (Indo-Aryan languages as L1) were the poorest performers, the ‘linguistic distance’ of their languages explaining the performance’ result

Phonological representations and early literacy in Chinese

Phonological processing skills predict early reading development, but what underlies developing phonological processing skills? Phonological representations of 140 native Cantonese-speaking Chinese children (age 4–10) were assessed with speech gating, mispronunciation detection, and nonword repetition tasks; their nonverbal IQ, reading, and phonological processing were assessed with standard tests. Results indicated that even without explicit script-sound correspondence at the phonemic level in Chinese orthography, young Chinese speakers developed representations segmented at this level, and such representations were more fine-grained for older children. Further, the quality of kindergarteners’ phonological representations (specified by sensitivity to mispronunciation in lexical judgment) significantly predicted their emergent reading abilities, and this relation was fully mediated by phonological processing skills, with rapid naming showing the strongest mediation effect. Such mediation was no longer found with the primary-school sample, suggesting plausible developmental changes in the relations between phonological representations, phonological processing, and reading during early reading development.postprin

Investigating Relationships Among Measures of English and Chinese Handwriting Fluency in Early-Elementary Chinese Dual Language Immersion Students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between English and Chinese handwriting fluency measures in early-elementary Chinese Dual Language Immersion students. This was done by conducting five handwriting fluency tasks among Chinese Dual Language Immersion students and comparing the findings. First, the findings showed that there was a moderate correlation between the participants\u27 English and Chinese handwriting fluencies and that English fluencies predicted Chinese fluencies. However, the students could write English numbers and letters much faster than Chinese characters. Second, as expected, Chinese DLI participants showed that handwriting fluency improved as grade level increased. Third, third-grade students were not much faster than second-grade students on both English number and English Chinese number tasks. The study informs Chinese DLI programs as it shows that supplemental handwriting instruction is likely necessary to narrow the differences between English and Chinese handwriting fluencies. Instructional amount and quality could be improved to increase Chinese fluency, and English and Chinese partner teachers should collaborate more closely and complement each other\u27s handwriting instructional efforts. In summary, this study identifies significant differences in English and Chinese handwriting fluencies, and further studies may be necessary to consider ways to address these differences