Characteristics Of Mandarin-speaking Students’ English Phonological Awareness Development And Its Correlation With Reading

Since the mid-1980s, phonological awareness, one of the key areas of phonological processing, has received wide attention from researchers. One of the main reasons is that phonological awareness can predict the subsequent acquisition of reading. The research indicates that the phonological awareness deficit is one of the primary reasons of reading difficulty. Although it has received broad attention about the relationship between phonological awareness and reading, and some general conclusions have been reached, there are debatable gaps in its conclusions. One of the disputed questions is whether it has the universal mode in the development of phonological awareness. Meanwhile, there are ongoing controversies as to the relationships between the development of phonological awareness and the reading acquisition. Mandarin-speaking students’mother tongue is a logographic writing system, and their foreign language– English is an alphabetic writing system. These two kinds of language systems have remarkable differences. What are the similar and different characteristics of Mandarin-speaking students’English phonological awareness development, and its relationship with reading, as compared with native English-speaking students?To discuss systemically the characteristics of Mandarin-speaking students’English phonological awareness development and its correlation with English reading, and provide essential theoretical basis for Mandarin-speaking students’English learning, this thesis carries out the following research. This thesis has taken the different learning experiences from students beginning in the first grade of primary school to university sophomores as the subjects of study. The study used multiple investigation methods and different test materials on English phonological awareness for a more comprehensive and systematic study. This thesis proposes to further clarify and understand the characteristics of English phonological awareness development of Mandarin-speaking students and create thorough analysis of its relationships with reading. Specifically speaking, the present thesis consists of three studies.Study I. Designing an appropriate English phonological awareness assessing tool for Mandarin-speaking students to make up for the lack of phonological awareness assessing tools for Mandarin-speaking students. On the basis of the actual situation of Mandarin-speaking students, this study amends the partial content of phonological awareness assessing tools in the United States and carries on the localization revision here in China.Study II. In order to comprehensively and accurately understand the overall situations and developmental trends concerning Mandarin-speaking students’English phonological awareness, this study measures 294 students from Changchun primary school to university students by using the tools that are designed in Study I, and compares it with the results of native English-speaking students.Study III. This study examines the relationship between Mandarin-speaking students’English phonological awareness and their reading scores; it also examines the predicting effects concerning phonological awareness to reading per grade. This study contrasts the Mandarin-speaking students’results with native English-speaking students’.This thesis has come to the following conclusions:1. In the Mandarin-speaking students’English phonological awareness assessing tool, the structure validity of the syllable level, onset-rime level, and the phoneme level are verified by using a confirmatory factor analysis. The three sub-scales have good construct validity. The study also examines the content validity; it shows that this tool has good content validity. In addition, the study examines the reliability of internal consistency and test-retest reliability in every dimension on the three sub-scales. The results reach an acceptable level, which show that the tool is reliable. Consequently, this is an effective and reliable tool for measuring English phonological awareness.2. The results show that from Grade 1 to Grade 3, English phonological awareness developed rapidly. After Grade 3, this developmental progress declines and enters the flat phase. So for the Mandarin-speaking students, the critical period for English phonological awareness development is before Grade 3.3. There is a similar developing trend between Mandarin-speaking students’phonological awareness, and English-speaking students’phonological awareness; that is a syllable level that developed earlier than an onset-rime level. The phoneme level is the latest. Consequently, the level of Mandarin-speaking students’is lower than that of English-speaking students’.4. Similar to English mother tongue students, there exist grade differences between Mandarin-speaking students’phonological awareness and reading scores. Specifically speaking, to a certain degree, basic level of phonological awareness-syllable level and onset-rime level have the forecast function to reading scores at lower grades; but with higher grades, phoneme level can predict the reading scores significantly.