This 4-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, syntactic processing, working memory (WM) and reading skills predict unique variances developmentally in three genres of Chinese writing (narration, argumentation and exposition) among 246 young Mandarin-speaking children. Hierarchical regression analyses were…

Discussion of ways in which second-language learners' processing of and interaction with narrative and expository texts affects their performance on cloze tests suggests that researchers and teachers interpreting these tests should not assume that such tests only assess language ability. (CB)

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)