Phonological awareness and learning to read Chinese

The research that is discussed here investigated the relationship between performance on tests of phonological awareness and learning to read Chinese. Eight-year-old children learning to read Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan were compared with children to read English in the UK. In Taiwan, all children are taught to read Chinese by first learning an alphabetic writing system (''Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao''), but this is not the case in Hong Kong. The results showed that phonological awareness was significantly correlated with reading test scores in both Chinese and British children. However, in the Chinese children, although not in the British children, the relationship between reading and phonological awareness was no longer significant when the effects of vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence were partialled out. In a further study, six-year-old children from Taiwan were used as subjects in a longitudinal study. In these children, there was a significant correlation between pre-school phonological awareness scores and reading ability a year later. However, the predictive power of early phonological awareness disappeared once the effects of pre-school reading scores had been partialled out. The research also revealed that the nature of phonological awareness skills differed in the Chinese and British children. For example, children from Hong Kong performed better than the British children at deleting the initial phoneme from words that start with consonant clusters, but performed worse than the British children at deleting the initial phoneme from words that start with a single consonant. The results are explained in terms of the Chinese and British children's familiarity with different types of syllable structures, and with different types of alphabetic scripts.