Component Skills of Reading Among Learners of Chinese as a Second Language.

Abstract

The component-skill approach to reading comprehension (Carr & Levy, 1990) intended to understand reading as a complex but decomposable component-skill system where various component skills contribute to reading comprehension while interacting with each other. Even though significant progress has been made in understanding how various component skills collaborate to contribute to second language (L2) reading comprehension (e.g., Jeon & Yamashita, 2014; Grabe, 2009), there is a lack of empirical studies that examine the component skills of L2 Chinese reading. To fill this gap, this dissertation examines the direct and indirect effects of semantic radical knowledge, character knowledge, morphological knowledge, vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge to L2 Chinese reading. Using a mixed method research approach, this dissertation investigates the direct and indirect effects of components skills on L2 Chinese reading, the component skills that distinguished high-skilled, middle-skilled, and low-skilled readers, learners’ perception of L2 Chinese reading, as well as the convergence and divergence of quantitative and qualitative data. The participants of this dissertation were 209 learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). A test battery with 12 subtests were designed to measure six latent constructs, including receptive semantic radical knowledge test and semantic radical meaning matching test (to measure semantic radical knowledge); lexical decision test and character knowledge test (to measure character recognition); morpheme discrimination test and compound structure discrimination test (to measure morphological knowledge); receptive vocabulary knowledge test and vocabulary synonym test (to measure vocabulary knowledge); word order test and grammaticality judgment test (to measure grammar knowledge); a multiple-choice reading comprehension test and a cloze test (to measure reading comprehension). Thirteen interviews and four focus groups were conducted among 25 participants. The main findings of the study include: (1) Vocabulary knowledge was found to have a significant direct effect on L2 Chinese reading comprehension. Semantic radical knowledge had a significant direct effect on Chinese character recognition. Morphological knowledge had a significant direct effect on vocabulary knowledge and a significant indirect effect on reading comprehension through the mediation of vocabulary knowledge. Grammar knowledge was found to be measures of reading comprehension. (2) The receptive vocabulary knowledge test and vocabulary synonym test scores could best distinguish high-skilled, middle-skilled, and low-skilled readers. This further established the significant role of vocabulary knowledge in L2 Chinese reading. (3) The learners perceived that characters, understanding the meaning of a passage, and words were important in L2 Chinese reading. The majority of the interviewees viewed reading in Chinese as difficult. Using dictionary and guessing from the context are the two most frequently used strategies for unknown characters. The interviewees improved their Chinese reading through reading Chinese books and reading online. (4) The quantitative and quantitative data supplemented each other. Both data sources converged on the main findings of the study. There are cases where the qualitative data did not directly support the quantitative data. The qualitative data also provided elaboration and clarification for the quantitative data. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data revealed a more complete picture of L2 Chinese reading.