Effects Of Metalinguistic Awareness And Rapid Automatized Naming On Chinese And English Reading Fluency Of Primary School Students

The study investigated the relative contributions of metalinguistic awareness(phonological awareness,morphological awareness and orthographic awareness)and rapid automatized naming to reading fluency in 103 fifth and sixth graders who learned Chinese as their first language and English as their second language.The results from regression analyses and hierarchical regression analyses showed that English inflectional morphological awareness,English rapid number naming,English rapid letter naming,English orthographic awareness,English compound awareness and English phoneme deletion significantly contributed to English reading fluency,with inflectional morphological awareness as the strongest predictor,whereas tone detection,morphological production,Chinese number naming significantly contributed to Chinese reading fluency,with Chinese rapid automatized naming as the strongest predictor.In addition,the study found merely indirect cross-language effects of linguistic and cognitive skills on Chinese and English reading fluency.These findings suggest that to a large extent Chinese and English reading fluency imposes similar demands on the four cognitive skills among native Chinese-speaking children.However,there are significant cross-language differences in that the importance of rapid automatized naming is particularly underscored in Chinese reading fluency while the role of inflectional morphological awareness is highlighted in English reading fluency.In a nutshell,Chinese and English reading fluency is mainly influenced by their respective writing systems.