Acquisition of Chinese Literacy by Ethnic Minority Children in Hong Kong Primary Schools

This study investigated acquisition of Chinese literacy by ethnic minority children in Hong Kong primary schools. Ninety-seven primary-four ethnic minority students from four schools participated in the study. Their Chinese orthographic awareness and knowledge, Chinese character recognition ability, Chinese listening comprehension and reading comprehension competence were assessed.;The results showed that the students' Chinese language ability is low, especially their literacy skills. There was significant discrepancy between the students' oral and written language competence. Further analyses were conducted in accordance with models derived from the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), in which reading comprehension is assumed to be the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. The analyses showed that the language-literacy discrepancy was related to the students' poor decoding ability. The students' reading comprehension performance was related more closely to Chinese character recognition ability than their linguistic comprehension competence. Moreover, the students' Chinese orthographic awareness and knowledge was found to be related to Chinese character recognition. The effect of the former on reading comprehension was mediated through the latter.;The study supports the relevance of the simple view model for understanding learning to read Chinese by second language learners. Studies of reading in alphabetic languages adopting the simple view have shown that the importance of decoding relative to linguistic comprehension depends on the developmental stage and proficiency of the readers, as well as orthographic transparency of the language. These results are consistent with our finding that for the participants in this study who were in upper primary level learning a deep orthography (i.e., Chinese), decoding accounts for more variance in reading performance than linguistic comprehension. Furthermore, just like understanding of the alphabetic principle helps reading in alphabetic languages, awareness and knowledge of the structural properties of Chinese characters, that is, the componential structures of the orthography and their phonetic and semantic functions, have a facilitative effect on Chinese character recognition and reading performance. Educational implications for the Hong Kong ethnic minority students and for Chinese second language learning were discussed.