The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

We investigated the correlates of word reading and spelling as well as the relations of word reading and spelling in Hong Kong Chinese children. A set of literacy-related skills and delayed copying were administered in kindergarten, and Chinese word reading and dictation were tested at kindergarten as well as in first and second grade. The final…

How do native Chinese-speaking (CS) and non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) children learn to read and write in Chinese? In the present study, 29 CS and 34 NCS second and third graders aged 76 to 122 months (M = 93.65) participated in an experiment where they were taught 16 new Chinese characters in one of four conditions--copy, radical, phonological and…

To examine cognitive correlates of dyslexia in Chinese and reading difficulties in English as a foreign language, a total of 14 Chinese dyslexic children (DG), 16 poor readers of English (PE), and 17 poor readers of both Chinese and English (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 17 children, drawn from a statistically representative sample…

This article explores how student behaviour and interactions change when teachers use "producing" as a primary pedagogical strategy (Papert, 1980; Ejsing-Duun and Karoff, 2014). Based on observed student and teacher actions and responses, as well as students' production, this paper emphasizes the importance of understanding how students…

Particularly in primary school, good performance on copy tasks is an important working technique. With respect to writing skills, copying is a very basic process on which more complex writing abilities are based. We studied the copying ability of second and fourth graders across four types of symbols which vary with respect to their semantic and…