Chinese Literacy Development

Research on Chinese Literacy Development (References)

Part I. Literacy Skills
Lower-level literacy

Character knowledge
L1:

Anderson, Richard, Wenling Li, Yu-Min Ku, Hua Shu and Ningning Wu. 2003. Use of partial information in learning to read Chinese characters. Journal of educational psychology 95.1.52-57.

Shu, Hua, Xi Chen, Richard Anderson, Ningning Wu, and Yue Xuan. 2003. Properties of school Chinese: implications for learning to read. Child development, 74.1.27-47.

Shu, Hua and Richard C. Anderson. 1999. “Learning to Read Chinese: The Development of Metalinguistic Awareness.” Reading Chinese Script, A Cognitive Analysis. Ed. Wang, Jian, Hsuan-Chih Chen, Ralph Radach, and Albrecht Inhoff, Taylor & Francis, pp. 1-18.

CFL:

Chen Chiu-hung and Ke Peng. 2013. The impact of instructional approaches and task types on learners’ character retention in Chinese as a foreign language. Proceedings of the international conference of associations of teaching Chinese as a second language (ATCSL).

Shen, Helen. 2010. “Analysis of Radical Knowledge Development Among Beginning CFL Learners.” Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language. Ed. Everson, Michael and Helen Shen. NFLRC, pp. 45-65.

Shen, Helen and Chuanren Ke. 2007. Radical awareness and word acquisition among nonnative learners of Chinese. The modern language journal, 91.i.97-111.

Character knowledge and text comprehension
Shen, Helen, 2005. “Linguistic complexity and beginning level L2 Chinese reading.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, vol. 40. no. 1, pp. 1-27.

Word level knowledge, including morphological awareness
L1 learners

Dong Yang, Yi Tang, Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow, Weisha Wang, and Wei-Yang Dong. 2020. Contribution of vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension among Chinese students: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in psychology, volume 11, article 525369 (open access)

Yeung, Pui-Sze, Connie Suk-Han Ho, Yao-Kai Wong, David Wai-Ock Chan, Kevin Kien-Hoa Chung, and Lap-Yan Lo. 2012. Longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading and spelling among elementary grade students. Applied psycholinguistics 1-33.

Leong Che Kan, Shek Kam Tse, Ka Yee Loh, and Kit Tai Hau. 2008. Text comprehension in Chinese children: relative contribution of verbal working memory, pseudoword reading, rapid automatized naming, and onset-rime phonological segmentation. Journal of educational psychology. 100.1.135-149.

Liu, Duo and Catherine McBride-Chang. 2014. Morphological structure processing during word recognition and its relationship to character reading among third-grade Chinese children. Psycholinguist research.43-715-735.

Liu, Duo. 2017. The influence of morphological structure information on the memorization of Chinese compound words. Reading and writing 30.1813-1834.

McBride-Chang, Catherine, Hua Shu, Jessica Yuen Wai Ng, Xiangzhi Meng, and Trevor Penney. 2006. “Morphological structure, awareness, vocabulary, and reading.” in Wagner, Richard K., Ed.; Muse, Andrea E., Ed.; Tannenbaum, Kendra R., Ed., Vocabulary Acquisition: implications for reading comprehension, Guilford Publications, 2006, pp. 104-122.

Zhang, Haomin. 2017. “Development of Morphological Awareness in Young Chinese Readers: Comparing Poor Comprehenders and Good Comprehenders.” Reading & Writing Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, pp.187-197.

CHL (Chinese as a heritage language) learners

Zhang, Haomin and Keiko Koda. 2018. “Vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) reading comprehension ability.” Reading and Writing, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 53-74.

CFL learners

Chen, Tianxu. 2018. “The contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing in L2 Chinese: Comparing more-skilled and less-skilled learners.” Foreign Language Annals. vol. 51, pp. 816–830.

Chen, Tianxu, Keiko Koda, and Seth Wiener. 2020. “Word-Meaning inferencing in L2 Chinese: an interactive effect of learners’ linguistic knowledge and words’ semantic transparency.” Reading and writing, vol. 33. pp. 2639-2660.

Ke, Sihui Echo and Keiko Koda. 2017. “Contributions of morphological awareness to adult L2 Chinese word meaning inferencing. The Modern Language Journal, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 742-755.

Packard, J., Chen, X., Li, W., Wu, X., Gaffney, J., Li, H. & Anderson, R. 2006. Explicit instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology helps Chinese children learn to write characters. Reading and Writing (2006) 19:457–487.

Shen, Helen and Xin Jiang. 2013. “Character reading fluency, word segmentation accuracy, and reading comprehension in L2 Chinese.” Reading in a Foreign Language, vol. 25, no. 1. pp. 1-25.

English and ESL

Stahl, Steven and Michael Jacobson. 1986. Vocabulary difficulty, prior knowledge, and text comprehension. Journal of reading behavior XVIII.4.309-323.

Susoy, Zafer and Seray Tanyer. 2018. The role of vocabulary vs. syntactic knowledge in L2 reading comprehension. Eurasian journal of applied linguistics 5.1.113-130.

Lexical Threshold

(see also Helen Shen’s article concerning lexical threshold re CFL learners)including Research on English speakers and ESL students

Laufer, B and G. C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski. 2010. “Lexical threshold revisited: lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension, Reading in a foreign language, 2010, Vol 22, No. 1, pp. 15-30.

Laufer, B. 1997. The lexical plight in second language reading: Words you don't know, words you think you know and words you can't guess. Inj. Coady 8c T. Huckin (Eds.), Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy, pp. 20-33. 1997, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laufer, Batia. 2013. Lexical thresholds for reading comprehension: what they are and how they can be used for teaching purposes. TESOL Quarterly. 47.4.867-872.

Laufer, Batia and Tami Aviad-Levitzky. 2017. What type of vocabulary knowledge predics reading comprehension: word meaning recall or word meaning recognition? The modern language journal 101.4.729-741.

Carver, Ronald. 1994. Percentage of unknown vocabulary words in text as a function of the relative difficulty of the text: implications for instruction. Journal of reading behavior 26.4.413-437.

Freebody, Peter and Richard C. Anderson. 1983. Effects of vocabulary difficulty, text cohesion, and schema availability on reading comprehension. Reading research quarterly. 18.3.277-294.

Wegener Signy, Elisabeth Beyersmann, Kate Nation, Ayako Prokupzcuk, Hua-Chen Wang and Anne Castles. 2021. Learning morphologically complex spoken words: orthographic expectations of embedded stems are formed prior to print exposure. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, memory, and cognition. 47.1.87-98.

Higher-level literacy
The role of syntactic knowledge

L1

Chik, Pakey Pui-man, Connie Suk-an Ho, Pui-sze Yeung, David Wai-ock Chan, Kevin Kien-hoa Chung, Hui Luan, Lap-yan Lo, Wendy Suet-yee Lao. 2012. “Syntactic skills in sentence reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children.” Reading and Writing, vol.25 pp. 679-699.

ALSO published online: 4 February 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Tong Xiuhong, Shingfong Chan, Catherine McBride-Chang, Xiuli Tong, and Hua Shu. 2013. Discourse-level reading comprehension in Chinese children: what is the role of syntactic awareness?

Siu, Tie-Sze Carrey, and Suk-Han Connie Ho. 2020. A longitudinal investigation of syntactic awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese-English bilingual children. Learning and instruction 67.101327. (online)

Tong, Xiuhong, Paul S.F. Chan, Xiuli Tong, Hua Shu, and Catherine McBride-Chang. “Discourse-level reading comprehension in Chinese children: what is the role of syntactic awareness?” Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 37, issue S1,2014, pp. S48-S70.

CFL

Everson, Michael and Chuanren Ke. 1997. An inquiry into the reading strategies of intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Journal of the Chinese language teachers association. 32.1-20.

Lee-Thompson, Li-Chun. 2008. An investigation of reading strategies applied by American learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Foreign Language Annals 41.4.702-721.

Huang Sha. 2018. A qualitative case study of CSL learners’ reading strategies. Chinese as a second language 53.2.131-162.

Reading for literal meaning

Perfetti, Charles, Nicole Landi, and Jane Oakhill. 2005, “The Acquisition of Reading Comprehension Skill.” The Science of Reading: A Handbook, ed. by Snowling, Margaret and Charles Hulme, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 227-247. (NOTE: This is a book chapter and covers a number of factors, including the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension)

Reading for literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension

Basaraba, Deni, Paul Yovanoff, Julie Alonzo, and Gerald Tindal, 2013. “Examining the structure of reading comprehension: do literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension truly exist?” Reading and Writing, 26: 349-379. (Published online 10 April 2012)

Cain, Kate and Jane V. Oakhill, 1999. “Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children,” Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11: pp. 489–503.

Day, R. & Bamford, J. 1998. Extensive reading in the second language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

General reading strategies

Chang, C. 2010. See how they read: An investigation into the cognitive and metacognitive strategies of nonnative readers of Chinese. In E. Everson & H. H. Shen (Eds.), Volume IV of Chinese language teachers association monograph series (pp. 93-116). University of Hawai’i at Manoa: National Foreign Language Resource Center.

Everson, M. E., & Ke, C. R. 1997. An inquiry into the reading strategies of intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 32(1), 1-22.

Part II. Additional factors involved in literacy development in Chinese and other languages
Chinese-specific factors:
The role of word spacing and word boundaries in reading comprehension

Bai et al. 2013. “Interword spacing effects on the acquisition of new vocabulary for readers of Chinese as a second language.” Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, S1, pp. S4-S17.

Rao, Gaoqi and Endong Xun. 2012. Word boundary information and Chinese word segmentation. International journal on Asian language processing 22.1.15-32.

The role of handwriting in character retention
Elementary school CFL learners:

Knell, Ellen and Haii West. 2015. “Writing Practice and Chinese Character Recognition in Early Chinese Immersion Students, Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, vol. 50 no. 3, pp. 45-61.

College level CFL learners:

Guan C. Q., Y. Liu, D. H. L. Chan, F. Ye, and Perfetti C. A. 2011. “Writing strengthens orthography and alphabetic-coding strengthens phonology in learning to read Chinese,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 103, pp. 509-522.

Factors that influence reading skills in all languages:
The role of noticing in literacy development

Schmidt, Richard. 1994. Deconstructing consciousness in search of useful definitions for applied linguistics. AILA review 11. 11- 26.

Shen, Helen. 2004. “Level of Cognitive Processing: Effects on Character Learning Among Non-Native Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language.” Language and Education, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 167-183.

Ogeyik, M. January 2017. “The comparative effectiveness of noticing in language learning,” IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching,. DOI 10.1515/iral-2016-0049

The relationship of spoken language skills and reading skills

Chang Ya-Ning, J.S.H. Taylor, Kathleen Rastle, and Padraic Monaghan. 2020. The relationships between oral language and reading instruction: Evidence from a computational model of reading. Cognitive psychology. 101336 (online)

Marks, Rebecca, Ioulia Kovelman, Olga Kepinska, Myriam Oliver, Zhichao Xia, Stephanie L. Haft, Leo Zekelman, Priscilla Duong, Yuuko Uchikoshi, Roeland Hancock, and Fumiko Hoeft,. 1999. “Spoken language proficiency predicts print-speech convergence in beginning readers,” Neoroimage issue 201. This is an online journal.

Shek-kam Tse , Joseph Wai-ip Lam , Elizabeth Ka-yee Loh & Raymond

Yu-hong Lam. 2007. The Influence of the Language that Hong Kong Primary School Students

Habitually Speak at Home on their Chinese Reading Ability in School, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 28:5, 400-417.

Su Mengmeng, Ping Li, Wei Zhou, Hua Shu. 2021. The effects of socioeconomic status in predicting reading outcomes for children: the mediation of spoken language network. Brain and cognition 105655 (online)

Yu Zhenyou and Nancy Pine. 2006. “Strategies for enhancing Chinese literacy in Chinese preschools.” National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, pp. 1-15. (This article is available online as a PDF download)

L1 readers and not on Chinese

Chang, Ya-Ning, HSH. Taylor, Kathleen Rastle, and Padraic Monaghan, “The relationships between oral language and reading instruction: Evidence from a computational model of reading,” Cognitive psychology, vol. 123 Issue 1 (2020)

Grabe & Stoller, Teaching and researching reading (3rd ed.) 2019. Routledge.

Lervag, Arne, Charles Hulme, and Monica Melby-Lervag 2018. “Unpicking the Developmental Relationship Between Oral Language Skills and Reading Comprehension: It’s Simple, But Complex,” Child Development, September/October 2018, Volume 89, Number 5, pages 1821-1838.

The role of oral reading and reading comprehension

Wu, Yongan. 2012. ‘Using external text vocalization to enhance reading development among beginning level Chinese learners,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 1-22.

Part III. Backward Design, Feedback, Enduring Understanding, Essential Questions, Feedback

Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. 2005. “What is backward design?” Understanding by Design, Chapter 1. Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development; 2nd Expanded edition.

Wiggins, Grant. 2012. “Seven Keys to Essential Feedback.” Educational leadership, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 10-16.

Glass, Kathy Tuchman 2013. Essential Understandings. in Mapping comprehensive units to the ELA Common Core Standards. Sage Publications, pp. 49-69.

Part IV. Assessment

Adair-Hauck, Bonnie, Eileen Glisan, Keiko Koda, Elvira Swender, and Paul Sandrick. 2006. The integrated performance assessment (IPA): Connecting Assessment to Instruction and Learning. Foreign Language Annals 39.3.359-382.