The Roles Of Chinese And English Syntactic Awareness In Bilingual Reading Performance Of High School Students

The present study investigated the development of Chinese and English syntactic awareness of high school students and probed into the roles of different dimensions of Chinese and English syntactic awareness in Chinese and English reading comprehension respectively. Ninety-six high school students were recruited in the experiment, with forty-nine 2^nd graders of junior high school and another forty-seven 2^nd graders of senior high school. In order to assess subjects'syntactic awareness, grammatical judgment and grammatical correction tests were conducted in the study. The participants were also administered passage reading as a measure of their reading performance. The results of correlation analyses indicated that the development of Chinese syntactic awareness was consistent with that of English syntactic awareness for high school students. Further regression analyses presented that Chinese implicit syntactic knowledge was the best predictor of Chinese reading comprehension for two grades, whereas English advanced syntactic awareness best predicted English reading comprehension for two grades. As grades increased, the predictive power of English reading comprehension from English advanced syntactic awareness increased; in contrast, the predictive power of English reading comprehension from English implicit syntactic knowledge decreased.