While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic…

Examines a recently (1985) compiled list of the 3,000 most commonly used Chinese characters, drawn from a sample of 11 million characters, and discusses the list's potential use as the basis for textbooks and vocabulary study programs, and as a database for computer assisted instruction. (CB)

This second year volume of a 3-year course in Chinese includes a textbook, vocabulary, and character lists. A student workbook has also been designed (see FL 002 777 ). The text provided dialogues and practice in vocabulary, translation, questions, writing, and language patterns. Ideas for homework are also included. The book is divided into…

This first volume of a 3-year course in Chinese includes a textbook, vocabulary, and character lists. A workbook has been designed for the text (see FL 002 773). Each lesson is divided into sections involving such learning devices as pronunciation drills, pantomime, questions and answers, pattern practice, stories vocabulary, dictation, dialogues,…