The Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Syntactic Awareness In The Bilingual Reading Performance Of The Primary School Children

Reading is an essential technique in accessing information in one'sstudy as well as work. As individual capability of retrospect monitoring language,meta-linguistic awareness is tightly related to reading activity. Phonological awareness,as one of the influential factors of meta-linguistic awareness, holds crucial position inwestern psycho-linguistic study field. Researches have supported that early-developedphonological awareness can be an important predictor of reading ability in spellinglanguage. Yet the relationship of reading ability and syntactic awareness, anothercomponent of meta-linguistic awareness, are disputatious. Researches on syntacticawareness focus on spelling language only. There are only a few domestic studies onsyntactic awareness, and even few ones on the relationship of the impact ofphonological awareness and syntactic awareness of mother tongue and second languageon bi-lingual reading.On the basis of former related researches, this study focuses on normal childrenand children of Chinese learning disability, and explores the development of theirphonological awareness and syntactic awareness in Chinese as well as English languagelearning. This study also tries to identify if phonological awareness and syntacticawareness are cross-cultural consistent by clarifying the relationship of passage readingand phonological awareness and syntactic awareness in Chinese and English learning.The impact of the phonological awareness and syntactic awareness in differentlanguages (Chinese and English) learning are also discussed, aiming of providingcertain theoretical ground for children's Chinese and English language teaching.This research includes three experiments:Experiment 1 investigated normal and Chinese learning disability children'sphonological awareness both in Chinese and English by discrimination task in the gradesecond, third and forth, in order to explore children's traits of different grades anddifferent learning levels of Chinese and English phonological awareness.Chinesephonological awareness includes four units: onset-awareness,rime-awareness, phonemic awareness and tone awareness; English awareness also includes four units:onset-awareness,rime-awareness,initial phoneme awareness and final phonemeawareness. The research shows that: Chinese learning disability children are worse thannormal children both in Chinese phonological awareness and English phonologicalawareness; while with the growth of grade, children's phonological awareness of twolanguages of different learning levels also improves, by the analysis of right rates, wefind that Chinese and English phonological awareness almost consistent in thedevelopmental orders of phonological awareness, there are significant correlationsbetween the components of phonological awareness of two languages, expectingChinese tone awareness, which show that some elements of phonological awarenesshave cross-culture consistence.Experiment 2 using the task of syntactic discrimination and syntactic objecting totest Chinese syntactic awareness and English syntactic awareness between normal andChinese learning disability children in the grade two,grade three and grade four ofprimary school. The result shows that, the level of syntactic awareness of Chineselearning disability children in two kinds of language are lower than normal children,while with the growth of grade, children's syntactic awareness in. different learninglevels are also improves .The research also discovers that the grade four of primaryschool is the key development period of Chinese and English syntactic awareness,children at this time always develop more mature syntactic awareness. From thecross—cultural consistency analysis of bilingual syntactic awareness, finding that thebilingual syntactic awareness under two tasks are highly related by correlation analysis,and the regression model also support that the bilingual syntactic awareness can predicteach other. And the research also discovers the level of primary school students' Englishsyntactic awareness higher than the Chinese syntactic awareness.Experiment 3 compared the Chinese reading achievement and English readingachievement of children between normal and Chinese learning disability children in thegrade two,grade three and grade four of primary school in order to understand thestudents' reading development level rand its relationship between phonologicalawareness and syntactic awareness. This research found out that the right rates of theChinese reading is higher than that of the English reading. Children with Chineselearning disabilities in any grade have got lower achievement than the normal childrenin both Chinese reading and English reading. Bilingual reading levels of children at different learning level improved with growth of grade. It has been proved that thedevelopment process of English reading level consisted with that of Chinese readinglevel. Compared the relationship of phonological awareness, syntactic awareness andbilingual reading, we found out that Chinese syntactic awareness is a predict index ofChinese reading level and English syntactic awareness is a predict index of Englishreading level.In this research, although we found out phonological awareness canpredict bilingual reading, syntactic awareness has a great power to predict reading levelsignificantly both in Chinese and in English.