The Effect Of Dialect Proficiency On Chinese And English Phonological Awareness And English Reading Among Primary School Students

Research on the effect of dialect experience on phonological awareness and reading has gradually come to the fore in the last decades.However,some studies have demonstrated that dialect develops bilingual phonological awareness and reading ability,while others reported a negative effect.The failure to differentiate the dialect proficiency of the participants may have contributed to the inconsistent results.With dialect proficiency as an entry point,this study posed three questions:(1)Are there differences in Chinese and English phonological awareness between children of different dialect proficiencies?(2)Are there differences in English word reading and reading fluency between children of different dialect proficiencies?(3)Is the relationship between phonological awareness and reading consistent across dialect proficiencies?Seventy-one primary school students aged 11 to 12 were recruited from a preliminary sample of 324 based on their dialect proficiency: Group 1 had no experience of dialect,Group 2 could only listen to but not speak dialect,and Group 3 could both listen to and speak dialect.They were given tests of dialect proficiency,Chinese phonological awareness,English phonological awareness,English word reading and English reading fluency.The results revealed that:(1)there was significant difference in English phoneme deletion between Group 1 and 2,and significant difference in Chinese tone oddity between Group 1 and 2,Group 1 and 3;(2)Group 1 performed significantly better than Group 3 in word reading and reading fluency;(3)Chinese and English phonological awareness significantly correlated with and predicted both English reading tasks in Group 1;but only Chinese phonological awareness correlated with and predicted word reading in Group 2 and 3.The study suggested a limited effect of dialect proficiency on ESL learners’ English reading.Children without dialect experience performed the best in phonological awareness and reading than children with dialect experience,while there was no significant difference in reading performance by children who could only listen to dialect from children without dialect experience.English reading teaching is suggested to be aware of children’s dialect experience,with more care to those who could not only listen to but speak dialect.Teachers could develop students’ systematic Chinese and English phonological awareness through basic skills lessons such as speaking and listening,help to discover the rules of correspondence between form-sound,improve skills of phonetic decoding and word recognition,thus improving their reading accuracy.