Contribution of morphological awareness to Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition.

Abstract

This study is an investigation of the contribution of morphological awareness in Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition. Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were administered to test children's skills in morphological awareness, phonological awareness, oral vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension. The results showed that after the effect of Chinese-based predictors had been accounted for, English morphological awareness of compound structure still contributed to variance in both character reading and reading comprehension in Chinese. This finding indicates a cross-language morphological transfer in acquisition of two distinct writing systems. The transfer from English L2 to Chinese L1 is due to the bilingual children's rapidly increasing English L2 skills in their primary school years.

Within- and cross-language contributions of morphological awareness to word reading development in Chinese–English bilingual children

“…This is in contrary to the "proficiency governs direction" claim (e.g., Hernandez et al, 1994), and suggests that the direction of metalinguistic transfer is also governed by other factors. In line with previous studies (e.g., Wang et al, 2006;, the current study provides new evidence that the differences in Chinese and English morphological systems may influence the direction of morphological transfer. For example, compounding word structure is more abundant in Chinese than in English (Pasquarella et al, 2011), implying that compounding awareness plays a more important role in word reading in Chinese than in English.…”

“…In contrast, very few studies have tested the L2 to L1 transfer in terms of the relation between morphological awareness and word reading (e.g., Deacon, et al., 2007;Wang et al, 2006). Hernadez and colleagues (1994) appeared to suggest that the direction of transfer was dependent on the language and writing systems, but not relative language proficiencies (high proficiency language to low proficiency language).…”

“…In the context of word reading, the plausibility of L2 English to L1 Chinese morphological transfer arises from previous studies of Chinese-English bilingual children in the US (Wang et al, 2006;Wang, Yang, & Cheng, 2009 Pasquarella and colleagues (2011), the pattern of L2 to L1 morphological transfer appeared to suggest that the direction of transfer was dependent on the language and writing systems, but not relative language proficiencies (high proficiency language to low proficiency language). However, the above notion remains inconclusive due to the language background of the children tested.…”

“…Chinese and English present as a potent language pairing for cross-linguistic comparisons given their striking differences in orthography and morphology (Ke & Xiao, 2015). Interestingly, there is evidence showing the transfer of Chinese morphological awareness to English morphological awareness (Zhang et al, 2010), as well as the contribution of English morphological awareness to Chinese word reading among Chinese-English bilingual readers in the MORPHOLOGICAL TRANSFER AND WORD READING 5 US (Wang, Cheng, & Chen, 2006). However, these studies have either focused on a single developmental stage of reading, i.e., either beginning or intermediate readers, or a restricted set of morphological awareness tasks such as only lexical compounding awareness task.…”

“…Also, according to Verhoeven and Perfetti's (2011) "universal view", morphological One prominent feature of cross language transfer is directionality, which has been mostly tested from L1 to L2 (e.g., Choi, Tong, & Cain, 2016;Choi, Tong, & Singh, 2017). In contrast, very few studies have tested the L2 to L1 transfer in terms of the relation between morphological awareness and word reading (e.g., Deacon, et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2006). Hernadez and colleagues (1994) pointed out that the direction of metalinguistic transfer was determined by language proficiency, which in most cases, L1 dominant bilinguals exhibit L1 to L2 transfer.…”