The Relationship Of Phonological Processing Abilities To Component Skills Of Reading Competence In Adolescent Chinese Learners Of English

Phonological processing is a general ability with multiple dimensions andphonological processing abilities specifically include three distinct but relatedcomponents:phonological awareness,rapid naming,and phonological memory.Overthe past three decades,a large number of studies have revealed that the phonologicalprocessing abilities play a significant and even causal role in the acquisition of earlyL1 reading skills.The knowledge of interrelationships between phonologicalprocessing abilities and reading development has led to an improved understanding ofthe nature of the reading process.However,numerous studies have producedinconsistent results regarding the independence of rapid naming in predicting L1 andL2 word reading.There is also controversy over the conceptualization of rapidnaming.The present research was intended to rethink theoretically the nature ofphonological processing abilities and their link to reading and examine empiricallythe contributions of phonological processing abilities to component skills of readingcompetence among adolescent Chinese learners of English,with a focus on therelation of rapid naming and reading skills.In order to achieve these goals,the presentstudy introduced the Lexical Quality Hypothesis(Perfetti,2007;Perfetti & Hart,2001,,2002) and Model of Information Processing(Shiffrin & Schneider,1977) asthe theoretical frameworks for analysis.In addition,the major reading componentswere identified and a tri-component model of reading competence was proposed,wherein word reading,reading fluency,and reading comprehension were included.Finally,both the cross-sectional approach and the quasi-experimental approach wereadopted to address the key research questions:(1) what was the nature of therelationships between phonological processing abilities and reading component skills?(2) What were the effects of training phonological processing abilities on readingcomponent skills? Study 1 and Study 2 were conducted to examine these twoquestions,respectively.In Study 1,the simple regression,exploratory factor analysis,and structuralequation modeling approach was utilized to investigate the relative contributions ofphonological processing abilities to reading component skills in a sample of 133 first-grade middle school students.Results showed that(1) rapid naming made nocontribution to word reading independently of phonological awareness,(2) rapidnaming was primarily related to reading fluency while phonological awareness wasprimarily related to reading comprehension,(3) phonological memory was unrelatedto rapid naming and reading fluency,but surprisingly,there was also no correlationwith phonological awareness,word reading,and reading comprehension,and(4) onthe whole,the three phonological processing abilities produced significant effects oncomponent skills of reading competence.In Study 2,a nonequivalent groups pretest-posttest design was utilized toinvestigate the effects of training phonological processing abilities on readingcomponent skills.The program consisted of two parts:one providing explicitinstruction in phonological awareness and the other providing training in rapidnaming.The participants in Study 1 also participated in the intervention program.TheRN group and the PA group received rapid naming training and phonologicalawareness training,respectively,and the control group received merely regularEnglish instruction.This study reported two important findings:(1) Training in PAhad significant positive effects on word reading,and(2) improvement in rapid naminghad no significant effect on either word reading or reading fluency.These findings have important theoretical implications.First,new formulationshave been developed of phonological processing abilities and their relation to readingcomponent skills.For example,phonological awareness usually refers to theawareness of the internal structure of spoken words.The present research has furtherformulated phonological awareness as fully reflecting the quality of phonologicalrepresentations,including word-specific and grapheme-phoneme phonology.Second,the present study has presented a clearer picture of the relative contributions ofphonological processing abilities to reading component skills.More importantly,ithas provided theoretical explanation and empirical evidence for the issue concerningthe independence of rapid naming contributing to word reading.This finding hasclarified the role of rapid naming in reading skills and confirmed that rapid namingmade no independent contribution to word reading.