There has been a significant volume of research studying the effect of individuals' motivation on reading comprehension. The findings of previous research have demonstrated both the direct contribution of motivation to comprehension and its indirect influence through mediating effects of reading amount and strategy use. The effect of the linkage…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with…

Despite much attention having been paid to foreign language (FL) reading and related variables such as self-efficacy, relatively few studies have focused on young learners, and even fewer on storybooks, arguably the commonest genre read by children worldwide for language learning. As FL learning commences at a young age in many contexts globally,…

The present study aims to examine the contribution of cognitive flexibility to metalinguistic skills and reading comprehension during primary school years. Forty-nine third-grade primary school children completed the measures of cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic skills including syntactic awareness (word order knowledge), morphosyntactic skill…

This study investigated Hong Kong secondary students' Classical Chinese (CC) reading comprehension, reading motivation, and the effects of different types of motivation on CC reading. Four hundred forty-eight seniors from four secondary schools in Hong Kong voluntarily completed a CC reading comprehension test and a reading motivation…

The present study investigated the executive functioning of working memory, inhibition, shifting, and planning in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and how they related to Chinese (L1) and English (L2) reading comprehension. Fifty-seven Hong Kong Chinese students at Grade 7 were compared with 57 typically developing readers of…

This study examined whether visual-spatial attention could predict Chinese reading achievement longitudinally beyond some well-established reading precursors. A total of 257 second- and third-grade Hong Kong Chinese-speaking children participated in the study. Visual-spatial attention was measured by visual search tasks, which assessed the skills…

Background: Word reading and linguistic comprehension skills are two crucial components in reading comprehension, according to the Simple View of Reading (SVR). Some researchers have posited that a third component should be involved in reading and understanding texts, namely executive function (EF) skills. Aim: This study was novel in two ways.…

This study examines the development of the reading comprehension of young learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in Hong Kong, with reference to the Simple View of Reading model. The model postulates that reading comprehension is a product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. A sample of 121 ethnic minority senior primary students was…

The present study explored the early predictors of reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese children. We originally recruited 290 Beijing and 154 Hong Kong children and further selected from each sample those (30 from Beijing and 22 from Hong Kong sample) in the lowest 25% on reading comprehension tests across the last two consecutive testing…

This study examined the influence of classroom pedagogic reading practices and out-of-school practices in explaining why the reading attainment of Hong Kong Grade 4 students was superior to that of their counterparts in Taiwan in the 2006 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Analyses of scores from 9,301 students (4,712 from Hong Kong…

This study investigated the relative contribution of syntactic awareness to Chinese reading among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia. A total of 78 junior high school students in Hong Kong, 26 dyslexic adolescent readers, 26 average adolescent readers of the same age (chronological age control group) and 26 younger…

Purpose: Inference-making skills are necessary for reading comprehension. Training in riddle appreciation is an effective way to improve reading comprehension among English-speaking children. However, it is not clear whether these methods generalize to other writing systems. The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between…

Predictors of age 10 spelling and reading comprehension skills in both Chinese and English from vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and word reading at age 8 were tested in this longitudinal study of 141 Hong Kong Chinese children learning to read English as a second language. The correlation between…