| Word reading is one of the most fundamental learning skills in children’s early literacy acquisition. A lot of previous research, mostly conducted among bilinguals, has demonstrated that meta-linguistic skills, such as phonological awareness, morphological awareness and orthographic awareness, are closely associated with children’early literacy acquisition. This study seeks to explore the relationship between Chinese phonological awareness, Chinese morphological awareness, English phonological awareness, English morphological awareness and wording reading in both Chinese and English among young EFL learners in China, and most importantly, to examine the possibility of cross-language transfer of meta-linguistic awareness in word reading between Chinese and English.Altogether 69 sixth graders from two classes participated in this study. They were from two primary schools in Ji’nan, Shandong province. This study focuses on the following three research questions:(1) How do Chinese phonological awareness, Chinese morphological awareness correlate with Chinese character reading? (2) How do English phonological awareness, morphological awareness correlate with English word reading? (3) Is there cross-language transfer of meta-linguistic awareness in word reading? To be specific, do Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese morphological awareness predict English word reading, and in turn, do English phonological awareness and morphological awareness predict Chinese character reading?To answer the three questions above, a series of measurements were employed in the current study. In Chinese, measurements of phonological awareness included onset, rime and tone oddity tasks; measurements of morphological awareness included Chinese Recognize Morphemes Test, Discriminate Morphemes Test and Select Interpretations Test. Parallel to Chinese tests, measurements of English phonological awareness were onset and rime oddity tasks, and measurements of English morphological awareness included tests of English Recognize Morphemes, Discriminate Morphemes and Morpheme Production. Besides, to test students’wording reading ability, Chinese character reading test as well as English word reading test were used. After the data were collected, they were analyzed with the assistance of SPSS 22.0.According to the results of Pearson correlations and multiple regression analyses, the major findings are as follows. (1) About the relationships between Chinese phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and character reading, it was found that Chinese character reading significantly correlated with Chinese onset, tone awareness, and especially Chinese morphological awareness. However, from the results of regression analyses, it was demonstrated that both Chinese phonological awareness and morphological awareness failed to independently predict the variance of Chinese character reading with other variables controlled for. (2) Stronger correlations between phonological awareness, morphological awareness and word reading were demonstrated in English. And it was indicated that English morphological awareness could independently account for 43.1% of variance in English word reading after other variables were controlled. (3) As for the cross-language effects, English onset awareness could significantly predict about 28.9% of variance in Chinese character reading, that is, English phonological awareness, especially, English onset awareness was closely linked with Chinese character reading. It might imply the transferring effects of English phonological awareness on Chinese character reading. Besides, it was also suggested that Chinese morphological awareness could have facilitating effects on English word reading indirectly via the path of English morphological awareness.Despite several limitations, this study enriches phonological and morphological awareness studies in Chinese context, provides some theoretical implications for the future research, and may shed some enlightenment on pedagogy. |
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