Abstract
This study aimed to investigate phonological awareness training by examining outcomes among Chinese children who learn Chinese without phonetic system training. Fifty-six Hong Kong children from the 3rd to 6th grades were recruited. Two-thirds of the children had been officially identified as dyslexic by the local government, and the remainder were considered high risk for dyslexia. The children were divided equally into a control group and an experimental group, with the groups matched as closely as possible by age and gender. Children in the experimental group were trained by onset-rime-level phonological training. The training lasted ~3 weeks, with 15 daily sessions lasting ~20 min each. Our results indicated that children in the experimental group made significant improvements in Chinese character reading, onset awareness, rime awareness, and rapid naming after training. The association between phonological awareness and Chinese character reading, especially the association between rime awareness and Chinese character reading, also changed after training. The benefits of phonological awareness training were more obvious for children younger than 10 years old. The results of the present study can be extended to provide another approach to Chinese learning for children suffering from reading difficulties who are not responding to the usual approach in their region.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
This study aimed to examine the effects of phonological awareness training on the detection of onset-rime sounds for the readingrelated abilities and Chinese character reading among Hong Kong children with dyslexia
Our results revealed that significant differences were found in onset awareness [t(27) = −6.09, p < 0.01, Cohen’s d = −1.29], rime awareness [t(27) = −7.74, p < 0.01, Cohen’s d = −1.68], and rapid naming [t(27) = 2.54, p < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.64] before and after training for the experimental group, whereas no significant difference was found in any task before and after training for the control group [onset awareness: t(27) = −0.83, p > 0.05, Cohen’s d = −0.14; rime awareness: t(27) = −1.04, p > 0.05, Cohen’s d = −0.26; rapid naming: t(27) = −0.44, p > 0.05, Cohen’s d = −0.09]
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Our results indicated that children in the experimental group made significant improvements in Chinese character reading, onset awareness, rime awareness, and rapid naming after training. Similar numbers have been reported in other countries with alphabetic (e.g., Korhonen et al, 2014) or non-alphabetic languages (e.g., Chan et al, 2007) These specific learning disabilities are marked by difficulties in the development of cognitive abilities and reading-related skills (Catts, 1991). Phonological Training and Chinese Dyslexia at early ages is considered an early indicator of reading problems in the future (for a review, see Norton and Wolf, 2012). Individuals who have difficulty reading Chinese have been demonstrated to have deficits in visual-orthographic knowledge (Ho et al, 2002, 2004)
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