Chinese Literacy Acquisition: A Multidimensional Puzzle

Abstract

Literacy is a multilevel construct comprising word reading, spelling, and text reading comprehension. Understanding the key linguistic and cognitive factors that support word reading, spelling, and text reading comprehension is fundamentally important to elucidate the detailed nature of literacy acquisition. While most contemporary models of literacy acquisition are developed on the basis of English and other alphabetic writing systems, little attention has been paid to nonalphabetic writing system, such as Chinese. We focus on Chinese literacy acquisition and emphasize how different properties of the Chinese language (phonology, morphology, and orthography) may impact the development of different-level literacy skills. A systematic review of extant research on literacy acquisition, along with our own work on Chinese word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension, suggests that phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic skills are all important to Chinese literacy acquisition, but the relative importance of these skills varies across word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension. Moreover, the contribution of each of these linguistic and cognitive skills to a single component of literacy skills also varies in different developmental stages. This suggests that a full model of literacy acquisition should consider the linguistic features that are characteristics of the writing system, as well as developmental context.