The ABC’s of Chinese: maternal mediation of Pinyin for Chinese children’s early literacy skills

Abstract

In the present study, maternal Pinyin mediation and its relations with young Chinese children's word reading and word writing development were explored. At time 1, 43 Mainland Chinese children and their mothers were videotaped on a task in which children were asked to write 12 words in Pinyin (a phonological coding system used in Mainland China as an aid to reading Chinese characters) with help from their mothers. The videotapes were later coded on a scale (adapted from Aram & Levin, 2001) of mothers' writing facilitation techniques. Scores on this scale of maternal mediation of Pinyin uniquely explained children's reading of Chinese words, but not writing of Chinese words, after statistically controlling for maternal education and age, and children's non-verbal IQ, age, and phonological awareness. At time 2, 22 of the children from time 1 were further tested on Chinese word reading and word reading task 1 year later. After controlling for children's age and non-verbal IQ, maternal Pinyin mediation uniquely explained 6% of the variance in children's word writing and 7% of the variance in children's word reading performance at time 2. Results underscore the potential importance of the maternal scaffolding role for reading acquisition both theoretically and practically in a domain not previously explored (i.e., use of a common coding system (Pinyin) for learning to read, rather than word reading itself).

Beyond Copying

“…Hence, the explicit teaching of Pinyin knowledge might potentially promote children's reading skill in the longer term. As shown in the previous study, maternal mediation of Pinyin, in which mothers provided different strategies related to Pinyin to help their children to write the Pinyin of each word, uniquely explained kindergarteners' reading of Chinese words, even with phonological awareness and other demographic variables statistically controlled (McBride-Chang, Lin, et al, 2012). The regular and transparent letter-sound correspondences in the Pinyin system can help children to derive pronunciations of Chinese characters, and even help children to learn the mapping between spoken language and print forms by themselves when learning to read new Chinese characters.…”

Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency

“…However, similar tone disadvantages in lexical access were recently demonstrated in orthographic tasks, providing stronger evidence for differences within lexical representations themselves (Davis, Schoknecht, Kim, & Burnham, 2015). Awareness of tones also appears to be weaker than awareness of other segments, even when both tones and phones are represented orthographically in the language (Burnham et al, 2011; see also Burnham, Luksaneeyanawin, Kantamphan, & Reid, 2013;McBride-Chang et al, 2012). In short, it may be the case that tones are represented more weakly and thus are more susceptible to attrition processes than are segments.…”

Cross-lagged relationships between home learning environment and academic achievement in Chinese

“…An explanation could be that Chinese parents engage in formal literacy activities much earlier (i.e., when their children are four or five years old; Chow & McBride-Chang, 2003;Li et al, 2008;McBride-Chang et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2008). Once children master the basics of character recognition and writing, parents likely shift their attention to more informal ways of supporting their children's literacy (i.e., by providing more educational resources or by reading stories to their children and discussing their content).…”

“…The studies that examined the role of home literacy activities in Chinese children's reading ability have reported a rather positive effect (Li et al, 2008;Li & Rao, 2000;McBride-Chang et al, 2012;Shu et al, 2002). For example, Li et al (2008) followed 88 fiveyear-old children from Beijing and Hong Kong for three years and examined if the home literacy environment was related to literacy skills both at the beginning and at the end of the study.…”