Reading
Do word skills and reading comprehension help each other in Chinese?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Chinese children's ability to understand word structures and their reading comprehension skills mutually boost each other over time.
Key findings
There was a reciprocal relationship where early morphological awareness predicted later reading comprehension, and early reading comprehension also predicted later morphological awareness. Word reading skills partially explained this link, acting as a bridge where morphological awareness at the start of first grade helped word reading in the spring, which in turn boosted reading comprehension in the fall of second grade. These predictive relationships remained significant even after controlling for differences in the children's non-verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and vocabulary size.
Methodology
The researchers tracked 149 Chinese first-grade children from two urban elementary schools in Shanxi, China, over four time points spanning grades 1 to 2. They measured morphological awareness using three spoken-word tasks: compounding awareness, homophone awareness, and homonym awareness. The team also assessed the children's reading comprehension, character-recognition word reading, and several cognitive control variables like non-verbal IQ and vocabulary knowledge.
Limitations
Because this study used a longitudinal, correlational cross-lagged design rather than an experimental setup, it cannot definitively prove direct cause-and-effect relationships. The study only followed children during their first and second grades, so the findings may not apply to older elementary students who encounter more complex texts. The researchers measured reading comprehension using only one narrative passage, which might not reflect how children understand other types of writing, like informational texts. Additionally, some initial tests showed minor floor effects, which could have slightly restricted the range of scores and underestimated the true strength of the relationships.
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