Relationships among Constructs of L2 Chinese Reading and Language Background.
Relationships among Constructs of L2 Chinese Reading and Language Background.
Date
2017-05
Authors
Hsu, Wei-Li
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Second Language Studies
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Abstract
Extensive research has been conducted on the relationships of Chinese-character
recognition to reading development; strategic competence to reading comprehension; and home
linguistic exposure to heritage language acquisition. However, studies of these relationships have
been marked by widely divergent theoretical underpinnings, and their results are not directly
comparable. The current study adopts a cognitive and component perspective on reading, and
uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine character-recognition skills, readingcomprehension
skills, strategy use, and language background. Among these four factors,
character-recognition skills are held to represent lower-level reading processing; reading
comprehension and strategy-use represent higher-level processing; and language background is
operationalized as a source of background knowledge.
The present study’s 85 participants were divided into four groups representing four
language backgrounds: Singaporean Chinese Mother Tongue language learners (Singaporean
CMTLLs) (n = 14), Chinese foreign language learners (CFLLs) (n = 19), Mandarin-speaking
heritage language learners (Man-HLLs) (n = 38), and Cantonese-speaking heritage language
learners (Can-HLLs) (n = 14). A package of eight instruments was administered via an online
platform, and included a language-background survey, a multiple-choice grammar subtest, a fillin-
the-blank cloze subtest, a multiple-choice passage-comprehension subtest, a strategy-use
survey, an ortho-phonological subtest, an ortho-semantic subtest, and a morphemediscrimination
subtest. The language-background survey was designed to gain a clear
understanding of the participants’ language backgrounds; the grammar, cloze, and passagecomprehension
subtests, to investigate their reading-comprehension ability; the strategy-use
survey, to capture the participants’ perceived use of six strategy types; and the orthoL2
phonological, ortho-semantic, and morpheme subtests, to examine their character-recognition
ability.
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L2 reading,
Chinese as a second language,
reading strategies,
heritage language learning
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