Developmental Changes in the Role of Different Metalinguistic Awareness Skills in Chinese Reading Acquisition from Preschool to Third Grade

Abstract

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.

The developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese preschoolers

“…The results showed that print knowledge of 6-year-old preschoolers was well developed (average score, 39.35; maximum score, 45), while radical-position knowledge in the lexical decision task was still immature (average score, 18.85; maximum, 30). Hence, the authors indicated that preschoolers only had rudimentary orthographic awareness, while the radical position knowledge might develop further after formal education (Wei et al, 2014). In contrast to previous studies, Li, Shu, McBrideChang, Liu, and Peng (2012) showed that 4-and 5-year-old children had a poor ability to reject pseudo-characters and non-characters, indicating that preschoolers do not have orthographic awareness.…”

“…Previous studies also revealed that preschoolers did not know the positional and functional constraints of radicals (Chan & Nunes, 1998;Ho et al, 2003;Luo et al, 2011;Tong & McBride-Chang, 2010;Wei et al, 2014). Non-characters violating combination conventions were made up of radicals with illegal positions, but were intact in form and spatial format.…”

“…However, as reported by Luo et al (2011), children were asked to accept pseudo-characters, which might be easier for preschoolers. Tong et al (2009) used a lexical decision, as did Li et al (2012) and Wei et al (2014), but found that preschoolers had emerged orthographic awareness. The participants were recruited from Hong Kong in the study of Tong et al (2009), while children were from Beijing in the studies of Li et al (2012) and Wei et al (2014).…”

“…When Chinese children are learning to read, they should be increasingly sensitive to the regularities of structure and function of radicals (Yeung et al, 2011). Chinese orthographic awareness is defined as a child's understanding of the orthographic rules for Chinese characters (Wei et al, 2014). The present study primarily focused on orthographic awareness in terms of the knowledge of legal components of characters (stroke, radical, and whole character), and the positional and functional constraints of radicals.…”

“…Moreover, 5-yearold Chinese children could discriminate Chinese strokes from English letters, and could more likely regard a pseudo-character than a non-character with illegalposition radicals as a real character (Luo, Chen, Hélène Deacon, & Li, 2011). Wei et al (2014) used a print knowledge test and a lexical decision task to investigate orthographic awareness. In both tests, children were asked to decide whether a noncharacter or pseudo-character appeared more like a real character.…”