A Simple View of Writing in Chinese

This study examined the Chinese written composition development of elementary-grade students in relation to the simple view of writing. Measures of nonverbal reasoning ability, component skills of transcription (stroke sequence knowledge, word spelling, and handwriting fluency), oral language (definitional skill, oral narrative skills, and syntactic skills), working memory, and Chinese written composition were administered to 249 Chinese students in grades 1, 3, and 5 in Hong Kong. Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that transcription skills (word spelling and handwriting fluency), syntactic skills, and working memory were unique predictors of Chinese written composition after controlling for nonverbal reasoning ability. No interaction effect of grade and cognitive-linguistic skills contributed a significant amount of unique variance to Chinese written composition. The structural equation modeling results showed that the postulated simple view of writing in Chinese can be used to theorize the findings on the cognitive processes involved in Chinese writing.