Learning to read Chinese: The roles of phonological awareness and morphological awareness

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological and morphological awareness in leading to read Chinese through an overall measurement of first and second graders with typical development and instructional interventions for second graders with reading difficulties. The guiding hypothesis is the nature of a language shaping children's leading to read. The basic unit of the Chinese writing system is a character that typically represents one morpheme and one syllable. Analogous to the importance of phonological awareness in learning to read English, morphological awareness may play an important role in learning to read Chinese.; In Study 1, 47 first graders and 48 second graders, grouped into three reading levels (good, average, and poor), were tested with a battery of phonological and morphological awareness tasks, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R), a character-recognition test, and a sentence-comprehension test. In Study 2, 62 second graders with reading difficulties, recruited from seven schools, were assigned to one of four conditions: phonological awareness (PA) instruction, morphological awareness (MA) instruction, phonological plus morphological awareness (PA plus MA) instruction, and control. Students were administered the same tests as in Study 1, excluding two syllabic awareness tasks and the PPVT-R, before and after intervention.; The results of Study 1 demonstrate that second graders were better than first graders on all measures except for the syllable-categorization task, in which the two grades did not differ. Similarly, except for the syllable-categorization task, in which the three reading levels did not differ, all the measures distinguished the performance of good readers from poor readers. Morphological awareness had a greater influence on children's reading performance than did phonological awareness. The results of Study 2 show that the PA instruction group performed the best on the phonological awareness posttest of the four groups, and the MA instruction group outperformed the other groups on the character recognition posttest. Unfortunately, no significant differences on students' morphological awareness posttest were found among the four groups, and the performance of students on the reading posttest was not greatly attributed to the intervention in phonological or morphological awareness.