The Bi-directional Predictive Power Of English And Chinese Phonological Awareness On Chinese EFL Children's English And Chinese Literacy Development

Over the past three decades,phonological awareness has been the focus of interest in Western psycholinguistic researches.Numerous studies have shown that phonological awareness plays an important role in literacy development.However,only a few studies have studied EFL(English as a foreign language)learners,and those on Chinese EFL learmers in the Chinese mainland are even fewer.In recent years,the objectives of researches in China have been limited to the relation between phonological awareness and English literacy.There are few studies examining the role of Chinese phonological awareness and English phonological awareness in English and Chinese literacy development.This study takes as its participants the fifth graders from Tiancheng Primary School in Wenzhou to probe into the bi-directional predictive power of English and Chinese phonological awareness on Chinese EFL children's English and Chinese literacy development.This study aims to answer the following four questions:1)What is the relation between EPA and CPA skills?2)Is Chinese children's EPA related to Chinese literacy?If it is,which level of EPA is the most predictive of Chinese literacy?3)Is CPA related to English word reading?If it is,which level of CPA is the most predictive of English word reading?4)Is CPA related to English word spelling?If it is,which level of CPA is the most predictive of English word spelling?This study selects fifth graders from a primary school in Wenzhou City as participants to examine the role of English and Chinese phonological awareness in predicting literacy development.Instruments employed in this study includes nonverbal intelligence test,CPA task(including Chinese syllable,onset,rhyme,tone and phoneme awareness tests),EPA task(including English syllable,onset-rime and phoneme awareness tests),Chinese character recognition tests,English word reading tests(including real-word reading and pseudo-word reading tests)and English word spelling tests(including real-word spelling and pseudo-word spelling tests).The collected data will be analyzed by SPSS 19.0 and various statistical means will be employed including descriptive analysis,correlation analysis and regression analyses.The results indicate that:1)English and Chinese phonological awareness skills are significantly correlated;2)The best predictor of Chinese character recognition turms out to be English phoneme awareness after all the components of CPA have been controlled for;3)Chinese phoneme awareness can best predict English real-word reading skills after controlling for all components of EPA,but none of CPA exerts predictive power on English pseudo-word reading,only English onset-rime awareness is strongly predictive of English pseudo-word reading;3)Chinese tone awareness and syllable awareness predict a significant amount of variance in English real-word spelling and pseudo-word spelling respectively after all the components of EPA have been controlled for.This study provides more theoretical support for the relationship between English and Chinese phonological awareness and literacy development in the two languages,and enriches the studies on the role of EPA and CPA skills in Chinese and second language acquisition.Moreover,it provides some theoretical and pedagogical inspirations for English and Chinese teaching and learning,and also sheds some enlightenment for future studies.