The Components of Chinese Literacy

Lower-level literacy skills

• Recognize the spatial organization of characters (上下，左右, etc.)
• Recognize the components of characters ( the 部件 bùjiàn), including radicals, phonetic elements, and other recurring components.
• Recognize word boundaries and use the principles of word formation in Mandarin to identify and form new words.
• Develop morphological and syntactic awareness, the ability to Identify phrases within a sentence and their contribution to sentence meaning.

Higher-level literacy skills

• Identify text cohesion devices such as conjunctions, sentence adverbs, and anaphora, to make inferences about the connection of events and the role and identity of actors.
• Identify and incorporate background knowledge and cultural assumptions that contribute to the meaning of the text.
• Summarize the main ideas of a text.
• Make predictions based on the text, its title, and any accompanying illustrations.
• Make evaluative judgements based on the text about author perspective, the purpose of the text, and intended audience.