Abstract
Guided by the Simple View of Reading (SVR considers reading comprehension as a product of decoding and listening comprehension) and the self-teaching hypothesis applied to Chinese (Li et al. in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24(3):252–263), this research examined (1) whether the SVR is applicable to L2 morphosyllabic Chinese; and (2) whether orthographic knowledge is a unique contributor to L2 Chinese reading comprehension; if yes, how orthographic knowledge, word decoding and listening comprehension jointly contribute to L2 Chinese reading comprehension. Fifty-five L1-alphasyllabary high school beginning-level learners of L2 morphosyllabic Chinese participated in the research and completed a set of paper-and-pencil or digital tasks. The finding suggested that the SVR is partially supported in beginning-level L2 Chinese reading comprehension: word decoding had a direct effect on reading comprehension and an indirect effect via the mediation of listening comprehension. In addition, we found that orthographic knowledge contributed indirectly to L2 Chinese reading comprehension via joint serial mediation of word decoding and listening comprehension.
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Notes
The alphasyllabary is a writing system that simultaneously represents sound at the level of the syllable as well as The phoneme; the morphosyllabary writing system represents sound at the level of the syllable as well as the morpheme.
One of the anonymous reviewers pointed out that stroke order is not represented at the stroke level in the interactive-activation framework. Based on our review of the literature, it seems that stroke order may be assumed as one of the many visual features, but not clearly specified in Taft and Zhu’s (1997) framework. For one thing, according to Reichle and Yu (2018)’s review of Chinese reading models, the first effort to explain Chinese word recognition was Taft and Zhu’s (1997) conceptual extension of the Interactive-Activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). And the 1981 model actually includes sequenced letter positions. By the same logic, stroke order should be among the lower-level visual features represented in the interactive-activation framework applied to Chinese. For another, Taft et al. (2000) mentioned that stroke-level visual features include “strokes, stroke intersections, position of strokes, etc.” (p.3).
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Acknowledgements
Dr. Tianxu Chen has received research funding support from the 2021 Research Project on International Chinese Education by Center for Language Education and Cooperation (No. 21YH69D) and the Independent Research Project by Minzu University of China (No. 2022QNYL40).
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Appendices
Appendix A
Items in the L2 Chinese decoding task.
32 monosyllabic words
的 个 和 看 零 猫 年 钱.
谁 听 想 小 有 做 白 穿.
到 对 给 红 ** 路 门 千.
票 送 问 笑 脚 黄 坏 短.
32 disyllabic words
工作 看见 老师 明天 朋友 什么 水果 同学.
下雨 再见 桌子 喜欢 知道 运动 因为 休息.
跳舞 手机 身体 起床 旁边 快乐 咖啡 好吃.
但是 唱歌 安静 帮忙 衬衫 蛋糕 满意 洗澡.
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Chen, T., Xu, X., Hao, Y. et al. Connecting the dots: the contribution of orthographic knowledge to L2 Chinese reading comprehension through serial mediation of word decoding and listening comprehension. Read Writ 36, 1261–1282 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10342-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10342-x