Best Practices in the Development of Literacy Skills in Chinese 2015

Reading is a complex process in Chinese.  Automaticity in character recognition is a necessary first step, but to become proficient readers, CFL learners need instruction and practice in the development of lower- and higher-level literacy skills.

Lower-level skills include

• Character recognition (accuracy and speed)
• Word recognition (ability to identify word boundaries)
• Phrase recognition (ability to use grammatical markers to identify phrases)
• Sentence comprehension – including ability to identify grammatical markers and their functions at sentence level

Higher-level skills include

• Lexical Access: The ability to identify the meaning of words based on the context
• The ability to identify and interpret markers of text cohesion
• The ability to identify text type and text purpose
• The ability to identify the viewpoint of the author(s)
• The ability to identify facts and other explicit, literal information in the text
• The ability to make predictions based on the text
• The ability to apply information from the text to perform additional tasks