Relationships among Constructs of L2 Chinese Reading and Language Background

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.