This thesis examined the role of metalinguistic skills in concurrent and subsequent word-level reading and oral vocabulary among Chinese-English bilingual children who learned Chinese as their heritage language and English as their societal language. While previous studies on biliteracy development among this group of children have mostly focused on one of the two languages, this thesis gave equal emphasis to both languages. The research had two general purposes: 1) to investigate the role of phonological awareness, morphological awareness and orthographic processing in predicting word-level reading and oral vocabulary in Chinese and English concurrently and longitudinally; and 2) to examine the cross-linguistic role of phonological and morphological awareness to word-level reading and vocabulary, concurrently and longitudinally, between Chinese and English. These goals were explored through two interrelated studies, using path analyses. The participants included 91 Chinese-English bilingual children, recruited from kindergarten and Grade 1 Chinese heritage language classes in Canada. They were tested twice, one year apart, on a battery of cognitive and literacy measures in Chinese and English.
Findings of Study 1 on within-language relationships indicated that, for word-level reading, all three metalinguistic skills were independent concurrent predictors in English, whereas only morphological awareness was predictive in Chinese. For oral vocabulary, morphological awareness was the only concurrent predictor in both languages. The longitudinal contributions of these metalinguistic skills were mostly mediated through the auto-regressors of the literacy outcomes. Findings of Study 2 on between-language relationships demonstrated that Chinese phonological awareness directly contributed to concurrent and subsequent English word reading beyond the effect of concurrent English phonological awareness. Yet, Chinese morphological awareness indirectly predicted concurrent and subsequent English oral vocabulary through concurrent English morphological awareness. Similarly, English morphological awareness only indirectly predicted concurrent and subsequent Chinese oral vocabulary.
These findings suggest that different metalinguistic skills are required for literacy development in Chinese and English. Moreover, metalinguistic skills transfer to literacy, even across two typologically distant languages, but the transfer patterns of phonological and morphological awareness to different literacy skills vary considerably. These results are discussed in light of current reading and transfer models as well as linguistic contexts of biliteracy acquisition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35889 |
| Date | 08 August 2013 |
| Creators | Luo, Yang |
| Contributors | Chen, Xi |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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