Chinese Children’s Reading Acquisition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues PDF
Preview Chinese Children’s Reading Acquisition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues
CHINESE CHILDREN'S READING ACQUISITION Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues CHINESE CHILDREN'S READING ACQUISITION Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues edited by Wenling Li Janet S. Gaffney Jerome L. Packard University ofI llinois at Urbana-Champaign SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC ISBN 978-1-4613-5274-7 ISBN 978-1-4615-0859-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-0859-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2002 by Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002 AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo copying, record ing, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. . Printed on acid-free pap er. The Publisher offers discounts on this book for course use and bulk purchases. For further information, send email to<[email protected]>. DEDICATION tJtill~%-Jl:t·:jH~mHil ~~~~~tJtill!F-M)Li!rstJ~1i1f~EJ{J~~I:At9fjjlJ,'&~#:EJ{J'iJIA91 ' "= # iUiH~?Jf1f.p00t¥J~1:.,)t-£J:.&ft!frll~I)fmlAtJtillt¥J1i1f~pj(; .p~~• We dedicate this book to the children, teachers, and school officials in Beijing,who have contributed to ourresearchon early literacy instruction, and to all of the childrenand their parents and teachers in the People'sRepublic of China,who may benefit from this work in the future. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii PartI: TheoreticalPerspectivesonLearningtoRead Chapter1. CurrentIssues inLearningtoReadChinese 3 Ovid1.L.Tzeng Chapter2. Children's EarlyUnderstandingofWriting andLanguage: The Impact ofCharactersandAlphabeticOrthographies 17 Kevin F.Miller Discussion:TranslationsandTransitionsinLearningtoRead31 31 HoucanZhang Part11: RoleofmetalinguisticawarenessinChinese reading Chapter3. PhonologicalAwarenessinChinese Reading 39 Insup Taylor Chapter4. The RoleOfMorphologicalAwarenessinLearningtoRead Chinese 59 WilIiamE.Nagy,Amy Kuo-Kealoha,XinchunWu,Wenling Li,RichardC. Anderson,andXiChen Chapter5. FacetsofMetalinguisticAwarenessthat ContributetoChineseLiteracy 87 Wenling Li, Richard C. Anderson,WilIiamNagy,Houcan Zhang Discussion:MetalinguisticAwarenessasaCriticalConstruct 107 Jerome L.Packard PartIll: Wide readingand the development ofChinese literacy Chapter6. Book-BasedProgramsinDevelopingCountries I15 Warwick B.Elley Chapter7. Shared-BookReading inChina 131 RichardC.Anderson,Janet S.Gaffney,Xinchun Wu,Chiung-ChuWang, WenlingLi,Hua Shu,WilIiamE.Nagy,XiaojieMing Chapter8. MorphologicalInstructionandTeacherTraining 157 XinchunWu,Richard C.Anderson,Wenling Li,XiChen,XiangzhiMeng Chapter9. Children'sLiteratureinthePeople's Republic ofChina:ItsPurposes andGenres 175 BelindaYun-YingLouie,DouglasH.Louie Discussion: SupportingtheReadingInstructionandLearningofChineseChildren 195 RebeccaBarr PartIV: FactorsinHome Literacy Chapter10.The RoleofHome-LiteracyEnvironmentinLearningtoReadChinese 207 Hua Shu, Wenling Li,RichardAnderson,Yu-MinKu,XuanYue Chapter 11.Writing SystemsandLearningtoRead inaSecond Language 225 Keiko Koda Discussion:VariablesAssociatedwithLearningtoRead inChinese 249 Erica McClure AuthorIndex 257 SubjectIndex 263 PREFACE We are pleased to contribute this body of work to the research literature on learning to read and write in non-alphabetic languages. Our intent has been to provide a critical investigation and discussion ofthe major issues relevant to learning to read Chinese, a language whose writing system isvastly different from writing systemsthat are normally investigated. While many works over the past two decades have addressed important issues of language processing by adult speakers of Chinese, the present effort is the first to focus on the acquisition ofreading by Chinese children. One ofour goals has been to examine issues involving classroom instruction in addition to theory and basic research, with an eye toward stimulating discussion that would beofusetothose interestedintheoretical aswellasapplied issues. The combined perspectives of contributors from psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, East Asian studies,reading, and education have provided a rich and textured resource base from which we were to draw for a comprehensivediscussionofthistopic. This book is the culmination of a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation entitled Learning to Read Chinese that was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August, 1999. International researchers from multiple disciplines came together to present and discuss scholarly papers, providing opportunities for productive and lively interchanges by experts on the acquisition of Chinese. The chapters in this book represent a selection of presentations from that conference that the authors revised with the benefit ofthe interactive discussions that took place amongtheparticipants. The volume is organized around four themes: Theoretical Perspectives in Learning to Read, Role of Metalinguistic Awareness in Chinese Reading, Wide Reading and the Development of Chinese Literacy, and Factors in Home Literacy. Each section includes chapters related to the designated theme followed by a critical response to the chapters offered by a scholarwithexpertise inthe area. TheoreticalPerspectives in Learningto Read Thesectionon theoretical perspectives presumes that learning to read is fundamentally a task of hypothesis testing and implementation, in which the child must first realize that print represents speech, and then work out the details ofhow that representation is instantiated. Grasping the nature ofthe speech/print relationship requires figuring out which units of language are represented by the elements of the writing system. A child would make only scant progress in learning to read without first understanding whether the x marks on a page represent phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, or something else. The development ofmetalinguistic awareness-the ability to identify, reflect on, and manipulate language forms-represents a critical stage in the acquisition of reading. After facets of metalinguistic awareness related to different features of language are defined and measured, the relationship between those measures and progress in reading acquisition can bedetermined. TheRole ofMetalinguisticAwareness in ChineseReading The section on metalinguistic awareness assumes that the facets of metalinguistic awareness that are likely to be important will most likely depend upon the nature of the writing system. In the case of Chinese, morphological awareness should be pivotal, since characters-the basic elements of the Chinese writing system-map onto morphemes. Thus, Chinese is based on a fundamentally different principle from alphabetic writing systems suchasEnglish, inwhich letters,the basic unitsofthe writing system, map on to phonemes, the basic units of speech. As phonemic awareness iscritical for learning to read English, the parallel argument is that morphological awarenesswill becritical for learningto readChinese. Wide Readingand the DevelopmentofChineseLiteracy The role that volume ofreading plays in the acquisition of literacy was chosen as one ofour themes because of previous findings showing that extensive reading influences children's fluency and reading comprehension. Oneofthe major benefits ofa largevolume ofreading confirmed in research outside of China isthat a large volume ofreading results ina rapid growth in vocabulary knowledge. Given that most Chinese schools rely upon the method ofintensively studying a small number ofshort texts to teach reading skills, there was reason to suspect that an intervention that succeeded in promoting extensive reading might have positive effects on reading acquisition inChina. Factors in HomeLiteracy Of the many factors that contribute to the differences in children's reading achievement, instruction at school and children's language and reading ability undoubtedly have a major influence on reading achievement. Another source that has also been reported as an important influence on children's readingachievement isfamily or homesupport. We focusedon four different facets ofhome literacy environment-literacy resources in the home, parent child literacy related activities, children's literacy related performance, and parents' education-to gauge the extent to which these factors, in addition to xi factors such as dialect differences, affects children's acquisition of primarily Mandarin-based literacy. Chapters 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 report the results ofa year-long study of literacy instruction in Beijing elementary schools. The study evaluated two instructional interventions, one to promote morphological awareness, the otherto increasevolume ofreading. The640 students involved inthis project wereenrolled in 16first-and fourth-grade classrooms from fourschools. Two ofthe schools serve areas in which most families are well educated and have technical or professional jobs, while the other two schools serve areas in which most families are less well educated and have jobs as skilled or unskilled workers. In order to investigate possible causal relationships among variables associated with literacy in Chinese, the research group created a battery of assessment instruments to measure morphological awareness, phonological awareness, visual perception, syntactic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and home factors in literacy. Perhaps these measurement tools will contribute in some small, but hopefully significant way,toeducational andpsychological measurement inChina. It is our hope that our efforts will have international appeal for researchers, educators, and teacher educators, and that investigators in the areas of educational, child, and cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and Asian and international studies will find that our findings relate to their work. We also hope that practitioners and educational researchers inreading andteacher education will findthe information derived from our multicultural approach applicable in their particular contexts. Our goal was to contribute to international comparative studies of literacy by elucidating the features of the Chinese culture, language, writing system, and pedagogical approaches that affect the acquisition of literacy. Finally, we hope to raise the status of educational inquiry among educational researchers who focus on this critical area oflearning to read Chinese-an endeavor that potentially affects25% ofthe world's readers. Wenling Li Janet S.Gaffney JeromeL. Packard ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We offer our deepest thanks to the authors for contributing their research to this book. We are grateful to the discussants for their insightful comments and productive suggestions. Thanks to Merle Levy for invaluable help in editingthe manuscriptand to Xi Chen for format editing. The Spencer Foundation has provided generous support for our literacy research in the People's Republic of China. Research reported in Chapters4,5, 7,8, and 10was made possiblethrough grants to the University of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign, ill addition, the Spencer Foundation sponsored the Conference on Learning to Read Chinese at the University of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign that was the foundation for this book. Part I THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING TO READ
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