The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of different first language backgrounds on early Chinese reading development by comparing a group of children who spoke a dialect at home and learned to speak and read Mandarin as a second language as soon as they attended Mandarin immersion programs with their Mandarin-speaking monolingual counterparts. The comparison involved five variables, two of which were measures of reading outcomes, word reading accuracy and vocabulary knowledge, and the other three were measures related to processing spoken languages, including rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness. The study was carried out in two phases. Participants in Phase One consisted of 30 dialect-dominant (DD) and 30 Mandarin-monolingual (MD) children from one kindergarten. Half of them were in their second year (K2), and the other half were in their third year of kindergarten (K3). Participants in Phase Two consisted of 218 dialect-dominant children from the third-year kindergarten to the third grade in one school. The assessments in Phase One were administered from March to April in 2011, and the assessments in Phase Two were administered from May to July in 2011. The current study added to extant literature by yielding several important findings with an under-represented population in Chinese reading research. First, the strong link between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, which has been documented in previous studies, is now extended to the group of DD children. Second, the current study revealed that in comparison to the MD group the DD group performed significantly poorer on Mandarin morphological construction in K2, indicating an impact of language proficiency in the development of morphological awareness. This impact appeared to affect the DD children's subsequent vocabulary development. Third, the current study showed grade variability in the rapid automatized naming (RAN)-Chinese reading relation and suggested that the component of language proficiency might affect children's rapid naming speed and moderate the relation of RAN to reading outcomes. Limitations of the current study and directions for future research are presented.

With the rising importance of Mandarin Chinese since the 80s, researchers have paid more attention to the Mandarin learners of heritage backgrounds who can understand or speak Mandarin Chinese before entering Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) programs. However, the study of Fangyan-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese has been long neglected and still remains scarce. This interview study was conducted with twelve Fangyan-speaking learners of Mandarin in U.S. universities with an aim of investigating the linguistic knowledge and ethno-cultural identities that Fangyan-speaking students bring to college-level CFL classrooms. Another focus of this study is to investigate the perception Fangyan-speaking students have about their linguistic abilities and what Fangyan-speaking students are perceived to be the expectations of their instructors and peers. This study was conducted in two CFL programs: a long-established dual-track program in a research university and a newly-established mixed track program in a teaching university. Both Fangyan-speaking students and their instructors were recruited for interviews and document data were collected from both students and their instructors. A modification of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1981) was employed in categorizing four types of Mandarin input, in which Cantonese pronunciation for reading purposes and media consumption were found to play important roles in Fangyan-speaking students’ Mandarin learning. Analysis of the data also revealed that Fangyan-speaking participants’ ethno-cultural identities may exhibit a nature of “hybridity” (Young, 1995) owing to their family immigration histories. Implications derived from the findings are offered for researchers, practitioners, and administrators of programs that serve tertiary CFL learners. / text