Critical Research Summary #1

I wrote the following critical research summary about a study in Chinese reading instruction and would like to share it with you all.

Bibliographic reference:

Chan, D. W., Chung, K. K., Ho, C. S., Lo, S., Luan, H., Wong, Y., Yeung, P. (2011, March). The core components of reading instruction in Chinese. Reading Writ, 25, 857-886. doi:10.1007/s11145-011-9303-1

Overall purpose(s) and research question(s):

The purpose of this study is to develop a core curriculum for reading instruction in Chinese that could be used in a tiered intervention model and evaluate whether or not this intervention model is beneficial for Chinese beginning reader after implementing four teaching components of cognitive linguistic skills in a program school since Grade 1.

Methodology:

Two hundred and twenty-three Grade 1 children from two elementary schools in Hong Kong participated in this study. There are 109 boys and 114 girls. One of these two schools was the program school that adopted the Tiered Intervention Model in first grade to third grade Chinese curriculum. The other school was the control school that used the traditional teaching approach. Both school used Cantonese as the medium of instruction for Chinese language lessons. The first three assessments were conducted at the beginning, middle and the end of the school year of Grade 1, the fourth assessment at the end of Grade 2, and the fifth assessment at the end of Grade 3. To examine the effectiveness of the curriculum, trained research assistants assessed the children from the two schools on an intelligence test, cognitive linguistic measures, such as oral language, morphological awareness, orthographic skills and syntactic skills and two reading measures. Oral vocabulary, morphological construction and word reading measures were individually administered; all other measures were administered in groups. Each testing session lasted for about 20-60 minutes.

Raven’s standard progressive matrices was used to measure nonverbal intelligence which included five sets of 12 items each with a total of 60 items. Participants under 8.5 years old were required to pick the best part from six to eight alternatives to complete the target matrix. Oral vocabulary task and oral sentence construction task were used to measure vocabulary knowledge and oral sentence expression. Morphological awareness was measured according to McBride-Chang et al.’s (2003) study. Twelve to fifteen items were tested in this task. Pseudo-character meaning judgment task was used to measure orthographic skills. Twelve to sixteen items were tested. Connective usage task and word order task were used to measure the children’s syntactic skills. To measure the outcome of literacy skills as the four-component curriculum focused mainly on reading related training of Chinese, word reading and sentence reading comprehension were used in this study.

Findings:

The findings showed that the Tier 1 intervention was effective in enhancing the literacy and cognitive linguistic skills of children in the program school. This study showed that the curriculum was effective for Chinese readers in Grade 1 and the positive effects were maintain 1 year later in Grade 2. Improvement in word reading and sentence reading comprehension for children in Grade 3 of the program school is required. In this model, results showed morphological awareness and orthographic skills are significant predictors of word reading. Orthographic skills and syntactic skills are significant predictors of sentence reading comprehension. Both semantic and syntactic skills are essential for effective reading comprehension in Chinese.

This study has shown that the reading intervention has successfully booster the children’s cognitive linguistic skills and reading performance, and progress in cognitive linguistic skills also significantly predicted progress in reading comprehension. Base on the findings, the core reading components in Chinese are identified as oral language, morphological awareness, orthographic skills and syntactic skills.

Critical Commentary:

This research paper not only indicated the significance of a number of cognitive linguistic skills in reading Chinese like many other research paper, but also explicitly helped students acquire these skills in a comprehensive and systematic manner. Teaching of cognitive linguistic with oral language skills, morphological awareness, orthographic skills and syntactic skills have been proven to be significant in learning to read Chinese. Comparing to the Big Five in English, the core components in Chinese reflect the need for different cognitive demands for reading in diverse orthographies.

Morphological and orthographic training are proved to be significant for reading Chinese. Although phonological awareness was not emphasized in this study, it may play an important role for learning to read Chinese characters with the Pinyin system. Future assessment of phonological training may be useful in contributing to the effectiveness of learning to read Chinese via Pinyin.