VARIABLES ASSOCIATED WITH LEARNING TO READ IN CHINESE

Transcription

1 Part :tv Discussion VARIABLES ASSOCIATED WITH LEARNING TO READ IN CHINESE Erica McClure University of illinois at urbana-champaign This edited volume of papers stems from the collaborative research on Chinese children's reading acquisition carried out by Richard Anderson and his colleagues in China and the United States. The first paper in this section of the volume reflects one aspect of that research, the examination of the relationship between the home literacy environment to which Chinese children are exposed and their development of reading skills. The second paper in this section broadens the focus, investigating the ways in which orthographic systems affect L2 readers of English and Chinese. I will now discuss each article in tum. HOME ENVIRONMENT AND READING PROFICIENCY Many studies have explored the relationship between home literacy environment and children's reading proficiency. However, the subjects of most of these studies have been English speakers. Consequently, the study presented in Chapter 10, which examines the role of home literacy environment in Chinese children's reading development, makes an important contribution to the existing literature. The authors, Shu, Li and Ku, collected reading proficiency data from fitst and fourth grade students in Beijing and administered a questionnaire on the children's home literacy environment to the children's' parents. The children were divided into two groups-higher and lower-according to the educational background of their families. Three types of statistical analyses were employed (i.e., regression analysis, path analysis, and a correlational analysis) in order to examine the relationship between four aspects of the children's home literacy environment: parents' education level, literacy resources, parent-child literacy related G. C h o w d h u r y e t. a l (. e d s. ) P, o l y p h e n y l e n e O x i d e a n d M o d i f i e d P o l y p h e n y l e n e O x i d e M e m b r a n e K l u w e r A c a d e m i c P u b l i s h e r s

2 250 Variables Associated with Learning to Read in Chinese activities and child literacy related activities. The results of a simple regression analysis indicated that when the four aspects of home literacy environment were entered together, 10.3% of the variance in the reading test sc;ores could be explained for first graders and 17.5% for fourth graders. These results are congruent with those found in research with English speaking subjects and were to be expected. Of more interest are the results of the path analyses that Shu et al. conducted with the students at the two grade levels. The path analysis conducted on the data from the first graders indicated that only one factor, parent-child literacy activities, contributed directly to first graders' reading proficiency. However, the analysis also indicated two other causal relationships. Both parents' education and literacy resources in the home contributed to parent-child literacy activities. The path analysis conducted on the data from the fourth graders revealed a very different pattern. Three factors: parents' educational level, parent-child literacy related activities, and child's literacy-related activities contributed directly to fourth grader's reading proficiency. Again, literacy resources in the home did not contribute directly to children's reading proficiency but did strongly influence parent-child literacy-related activities. In explaining the fact that a child's literacy-related activities contributed to fourth grader's reading proficiency but not to that of first graders, Shu et al. quite reasonably suggest that fourth graders have sufficient ability to read by themselves but first graders do not. A more intriguing difference between the results for the first and fourth graders involves the parents' educational level. This factor contributed directly to fourth graders' reading proficiency while it contributed to parent-child literacy activities of first graders. Why this variable should make a direct contribution at the fourth grade level but not at the first grade level is not explained in the study and is certainly an issue worthy of further exploration. Shu et al. speculate that educational level might influence the manner in which parents communicate with their children which, in tum, may affect the children's reading achievement. They suggest that additional studies are needed to further explore how parents' educational backgrounds relate to children's reading development. Such studies might be patterned on the Bristol Study, a longitudinal study of language development conducted by Wells and his associates (Wells, 1986) which followed children from the age of fifteen months through elementary school. The study, which combined naturalistic data collection, language testing, and interviews with parents and teachers, stresses the centrality of literacy to school achievement and discusses why differences in children's performance on literacy related tasks might have been associated with family background. One of the factors associated with family background to which Wells assigns great importance is parents' engagement in reading and discussing stories with their children. According to Wells, it is through this experience that a child begins to

3 Chinese Children's Reading Acquisition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues 251 discover the potential of language to create a world of meaning that is not dependent on the nonlinguistic context. In concluding their analyses of the relationship between homeliteracy environment and reading proficiency, Shu et al. present a series of correlations between the responses on the parental questionnaire items and the children's reading scores. The results indicate that the number of books, magazines and newspapers in the home is highly correlated with children's reading proficiency at both first- and fourth-grade levels. Parent-child literacy activities were also correlated with reading proficiency at both grades. Children whose parents read more had higher reading scores as did children whose parents began to read to them and to teach them characters at a younger age. For fourth graders the frequency with which children read at home was also correlated with reading proficiency. When correlations were limited to data from families with a lower educational level, however, only the age at which parents began to teach characters was significantly correlated with reading proficiency of first graders. For fourth graders, the number of magazines and newspapers in the home, the age at which parents began to teach characters to a child, the age at which parents began to read to a child, and the frequency with which a child engaged in independent reading were all correlated with reading proficiency. No explanation is provided for the differences in the correlational patterns between first and fourth graders from families of lower educational background nor is an explanation presented for differences between the correlational patterns found for child from families of lower and higher educational background. Additional research to investigate the factors that might account for these differences would compliment the research proposed by the authors of the present study. This would extend a line of inquiry that has already made a significant contribution to our understanding of the crosslinguistic relationship between aspects of the home literacy environment and reading proficiency. WRITING SYSTEMS AND LEARNING TO READ A SECOND LANGUAGE In Chapter 11, Keiko Koda provides a very useful discussion of the phonological and morphological aspects of intra word awareness associated with literacy in two languages whose orthographies have quite different structural and representational properties-english, an alphabetic language, and Chinese, a logographic language. The main contribution of this chapter, however, lies in the investigation of the relationship between intraword awareness and literacy among L2 learners. Koda addresses three issues: (1) how and to what extent Ll intraword awareness affects the formation of L2 awareness and the subsequent development of lexical competence, (2) how L2

4 252 Variables Associated with Learning to Read in Chinese intra word awareness develops and how cognitively mature L2 learners progressively use their expanding intraword awareness in lexical learning and processing, and (3) the impact of limited linguistic sophistication on the development of intraword awareness among young, preliterate L2learners. During the past two decades, reading researchers have conducted numerous studies of the effects of orthographic differences on lexical processing. Additionally, studies of the effects of transfer have a long history in the field of second language acquisition research. However, little attention has been paid to the systematic investigation of the effects of Ll orthography in L2 reading. Consequently, Koda's discussion of possible transfer effects of Ll intraword awareness makes a particularly valuable contribution. Koda suggests that L2 intraword awareness is an amalgamated form of crosslinguistic interactions of Ll intraword awareness and L2 lexical input. She states that "there is a high probability that L2 readers can substantially improve performance efficiency through cumulative experience in processing L2 visual input using Ll-based procedures" (p.238 ). However, the continued reliance upon Ll-based procedures may limit the performance efficiency that can be achieved. Indeed, in her discussion of how L2 intraword awareness develops and is used in lexical learning and processing, Koda states that L2 character-learning studies suggest that: (1) the ability to use component radical information develops as character processing experience increases; (2) with limited character processing experience, L2 learners of logographic languages become sensitive to the functional and structural properties of the function-specific radicals; and (3) such sensitivity may determine, at least in part, the manner in which unfamiliar characters are perceived and processed.(p.241 ) Thus, rather than improving performance efficiency through cumulative experience in processing L2 written texts using Ll-based procedures, improved performance efficiency may come about primarily through the L2 learner's acquisition of the components of intraword awareness acquired by native speakers. In her discussion of transfer effects, Koda also reports the results of several earlier studies, which she and her associates conducted to investigate the intraword awareness of ESL readers whose Ll orthographies were logographic (Le., Chinese subjects) or alphabetic-syllabary (i.e., Korean subjects). In Koda (1998, 1999) she hypothesized that the Chinese subjects would be less sensitive to intraword structures and would display poorer decoding skills. In fact, the two groups differed neither in intraword sensitivity nor in decoding. However, while intraword sensitivity, decoding skills, and reading comprehension were all closely interconnected among Korean ESL learners, no such relationship was found for the Chinese ESL learners.

5 Chinese Children's Reading Acquisition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues 253 Koda interprets these results as an indication that differential Ll orthographic experience may not always generate efficiency differences but that they can induce a strong preference for particular processing procedures. This interpretation is congruent with the findings of Segalowitz, Poulsen, and Komoda (1991), who investigated the reading performance of French-English bilinguals with very high levels of skills in both their Ll and L2. They found that many of their subjects, despite being highly skilled in L2, did not perform as well on L2 reading tasks as on Ll reading tasks. They concluded that the differences between L2 and Ll reading in skilled bilinguals was analogous to differences in the Ll reading of skilled and less skilled readers. Namely, less skilled readers lag behind skilled readers in terms of the automaticity (speed and accuracy) with which word recognition is carried out. As a result, less skilled readers make greater compensatory use of contextual information to aid word recognition than do skilled readers. Thus, the lack of a correlation between intra word awareness and reading comprehension for the Chinese subjects-in this case, less skilled readersmay be attributed to the fact that they relied on contextual information to a greater extent than did the Korean subjects. In fact, in more recent studies, Koda and her associates directly tested this possibility and found that while Chinese ESL learners were significantly slower than the Koreans in conducting intraword structural analysis, they were far more efficient in integrating morphological and contextual information during sentence processing. Koda concludes that "Chinese literacy has long-lasting, clearly identifiable, cognitive consequences; and also that writing systems mold and shape particular cognitive and perceptual capabilities underlying lexical competence" (p. 239 ) These conclusions are supported by a study by Chikamatsu (1996) in which she investigated the effects of Ll orthography on L2 word recognition by examining the different response patterns of American and Chinese learners of Japanese while reading words in kana. Chikamatsu found that Chinese subjects depended more on visual information to recognize words in kana than did the English subjects while the English subjects depended more on phonological information than did the Chinese subjects. Thus, the two groups of subjects showed different word recognition strategies in L2 reading that reflected principles of each group's Ll orthography, further evidence of the transfer of Ll word recognition strategies to the process of L2 word recognition. However, in her conclusion, Chikamatsu brings up a point worth reiterating. She notes that several studies have found a variation in the dependence on visual and phonological coding (e.g., Baron & Strawson, 1976; Brown, Lupker & Colombo, 1994) even among native English speaking readers. Given that fact, more care needs to be taken in the design of studies comparing the performance of two or more groups speaking different native languages. In using inferential statistics to compare the performance of such groups, often the variability in the performance within one group and the

6 254 Variables Associated with Learning to Read in Chinese overlapping of the performance of some subjects across groups are overlooked. In the final section, Koda explores the possible impact of limited linguistic sophistication on the formation of intraword awareness among young, preliterate, L2 learners. Various authors have suggested that reading is a type of "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which a reader scans a line to pick up graphic cues, which are then used in the process of making a prediction, a guess, about the content of the written text (Goodman, 1970; Smith, 1971). While the guess depends on graphic cues, it is also dependent upon the reader's knowledge of the world and the syntax of the language as well as on contextual information that has already been read and understood. McLaughlin notes that "lacking the semantic and syntactic knowledge of the native speaker, children reading in a second language in which they have limited proficiency are at a considerable disadvantage" (MCLaughlin, 1985, p. 130). He further notes that many children also have difficulty with certain sound discriminations in a second language, if their first language does not include those sound discriminations. Downing (1984) would also take the position that preliterate children will acquire literacy skills more rapidly in their native language than in a second language. Downing claims that the cognitively confusing effects of teaching literacy in a second language will involve both structural and functional aspects, Koda's analysis of the difficulties faced by young, pre literate L2 learners of Mandarin is congruent with the previously presented views. She suggests that it is unlikely that learners, who have limited knowledge of their L2, will easily learn to recognize the significant functional units of Mandarin or easily acquire the metalinguistic ability required to adapt systematic, analytical approaches to character learning. Koda also points out that while children acquiring literacy skills in their L1 need to learn to attach visual labels to familiar words which are part of their oral vocabulary. Children with limited L2 proficiency need to build three linkages simultaneously: soundmeaning, symbol-sound, and meaning-symbol. She further notes that without prior literacy experience, children will have little knowledge of how print relates to speech. Differences in experiential background between L1 and L2 learners are also worth mentioning. Texts will be based on the background of L1 learners, thus, L2 learners may be deprived of some of the cues to textual meaning that are derived from world knowledge. The world-knowledge factor has been shown to make an important contribution to L2 reading comprehension in a number of studies (Carrell, 1987; Hudson, 1982). Koda concludes that these early difficulties will have consequences for the L2 learners' formation of the intraword- awareness skills underlying character learning and processing. Since characters introduced in the early grades become radicals used as components of the more complex characters taught later, L2 learners will be seriously handicapped if they fail to learn the basic single-unit characters. She suggests that even if such learners were able

7 Chinese Children's Reading Acquisition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues 255 to visually distinguish a character's elements, it would be virtually impossible for them to recognize the basic functions of individual phonological and semantic radicals. Koda, therefore, concludes, that if L2 learners have underdeveloped intra word awareness, their character learning will be heavily dependent upon rote memorization rather than on radical-based analysis. Thus, L2 learners will find it extremely difficult to learn the large number of characters requisite to functional literacy. Koda's analysis of the difficulties likely to be faced by young, pre literate children acquiring literacy skills in Mandarin, their L2, clearly is in accord with what is known about Ll and L2 literacy and the role of intraword awareness in reading logographic languages. What is needed now is a systematic program of research to investigate the predictions she has made. REFERENCES Baron, 1, & Strawson, C. (1976). Orthographic and word-specific mechanisms in children's reading of words. Child Development, 50, Brown, P., Lupker, S., & Colombo, L. (1994). Interacting sources of information in word naming: A study of individual differences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,20, Carrell, P. L. (1987). Content and formal schemata in ESL reading. TESOL Quarterly,21, Chikamatsu, N. (1996). The effects of Ll orthography on L2 word recognition: A study of American and Chinese learners of Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,18, Downing, 1 (1984). A source of cognitive confusion for beginning readers: Learning in a second language. Reading Teacher, 37, Goodman, K.S. (1970). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. In D.V. Gunderson (Ed.), Language and reading: An interdisciplinary approach. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Hudson, T. (1982). The effects of induced schemata on the "short circuit" in L2 reading: Nondecoding factors in L2 reading performance. Language Learning,32, Koda, K. (1998). The role of phonemic awareness in L2 reading. Second Language Research, 14, Koda, K. (1999). The development of L2 intraword structural sensitivity. Modem Language Journal, 83, McLaughlin, B. (1985). Second -language acquisition in childhood: Volume 2. School age children. (2 nd ed). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Segalowitz, N., Poulson, C., & Komoda, M. (1991). Lower level components of reading skill in higher level bilinguals: Implications for reading instruction. In 1 H. Hulstijn & 1 F. Matter (Eds.), Reading in two languages. AILA Review-Revue De L-AlLA, 8, Smith, F. (1971). Understanding reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Wells, G. (1986). The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.