Promoting Chinese Literacy in South Asian Preschoolers and their Mothers in Hong Kong: An Intervention Study

Promoting foundational linguistic skills for reading development in young Chinese language learners: A 1‐year intervention study

“…We also observed the facilitative effect of copying on Chinese literacy acquisition (Guan et al, 2011;Lau et al, 2020;Wong et al, 2023); character copying remains an important method for consolidating students' orthographic representations and character/word learning. It is important to note that the treatment-group students in our study had an advantage in orthographic knowledge and word reading, which may have resulted in a positive Matthew effect, where initial advantages lead to cumulative advantages in their reading development (Stanovich, 1986).…”

“…We recognised that the assumed enhancement of the students' morphological awareness extrapolates the results, as our study did not measure morphological skills. However, per the findings of intervention studies by Lau et al (2020) and Wu et al (2009), instruction on the characters' shape-to-meaning connections, grapho-morphological analysis of characters (i.e., knowledge of semantic radicals), and morphological analysis of words and phrases were beneficial to the students' word reading. As the participating teachers confirmed, the analytical approach to characters, words and phrases was especially facilitative in developing the CSL learners' repertoire of Chinese written expressions.…”

“…Particularly, for CSL learners, the presentation of compound characters sharing the same radicals in groups (Taft & Chung, 1999; Xu et al, 2014) and elaboration on the characters' structure (with highlights on the constituent radicals) (Chang et al, 2014; Shen, 2004; Wang et al, 2004) promote better character learning and retention. Apart from an analytic instruction approach, some researchers have established the usefulness of character copying exercises, through which Chinese learners could obtain a better understanding of characters' internal structures (Guan et al, 2011), in promoting Chinese literacy (Lau et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2018; Wang & McBride, 2017).…”

“…As for the transparent morphological structure of Chinese words, promoting morphological awareness is an effective instructional strategy (McBride, 2016). Other than copying exercises, both Lau et al (2020) and Wang and McBride (2017) had elements of morphological knowledge in their programmes, including characters' orthographic shape‐to‐meaning instruction, morphological analysis of compounding words, and/or learning of words sharing the same characters, facilitating their word reading and writing. In Wu et al's (2009) study, Grade 1 students in the treatment group were taught not only the morphological word structures but also the grapho‐morphological character structures (i.e., the position regularities and linguistic functions of semantic radicals).…”