The present study explored the relationship between reading comprehension skill and morphological awareness among young Chinese readers. The objectives were to investigate whether morphological awareness is a critical cognitive and linguistic ability to differentiate poor comprehenders and good comprehenders and to further scrutinize the…

This study explored the concurrent and longitudinal effects of morphological awareness on the development of reading comprehension among Chinese-speaking children (N = 123, mean[subscript age] = 8.1 at Time 2). Drawing upon multivariate analyses, the study found that morphological awareness and lexical inferencing ability were intertwined together…

Two groups of 12-year-old ethnic minority (EM) users of alphasyllabary (66 Tibetan and 45 Yi) were compared with 42 Han Chinese students in comprehending Chinese narrative and expository texts, each with inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs (verbal working memory, orthographic and sentential…

We studied the performance in three genres of Chinese written composition (narration, exposition, and argumentation) of 158 grade 4, 5, and 6 poor Chinese text comprehenders compared with 156 good Chinese text comprehenders. We examined text comprehension and written composition relationship. Verbal working memory (verbal span working memory and…

A crucial area in FL reading research is the transfer of reading skills from L1 to FL. Among all the reading skills, comprehension monitoring plays an important role. This study examines relationship between comprehension monitoring outcomes in L1 and FL reading among Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different FL…

Whether the simple view of reading (SVR) as incorporated in the componential model of reading (CMR) is applicable to other orthographies than English was explored in this study. Spanish, with transparent orthography and Chinese, with opaque orthography were selected because of their diverse characteristics. The first part reports a study of…

Background: The latest report by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), issued in 2006, indicated that Hong Kong Primary 4 Chinese students outperformed children from 45 countries and provinces in reading comprehension tests that measured their higher-order reading proficiency. However, the study gave no indication of how…

This study investigated how students' extrinsic motivation, home literacy and classroom instructional practices were related to the students' reading proficiency of 734 Chinese second-graders (48.2 per cent girls and 51.4 per cent boys) from twenty-two classes in seven primary schools in Hong Kong. The mean student age was 7.5 years. All…

This article examines language learner strategy use reported by 121 Chinese learners of English through a questionnaire and the relationships between their strategy use and language performance on a national English proficiency test: College English Test-Band 4. Results showed that this group of learners reported using more metacognitive…