Abstract
Metalinguistic knowledge has a facilitative effect on reading comprehension. This meta-analysis examined the relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and reading comprehension among Chinese students. By focusing on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension performance, this study synthesized 46 studies with 73 independent samples that represented 10,793 Chinese students from primary school to university levels. We found that in both Chinese and English scripts' reading, morphological awareness had the strongest correlation with reading comprehension, whereas both phonological awareness and orthographical skill had a similar medium correlation with reading comprehension. All three metalinguistic knowledge, which was not significantly influenced by the selected moderators of grade group, area, language type, and assessment, had an independent correlation with reading comprehension. The results suggested that reading stages did not significantly impact the function of metalinguistic knowledge on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension for Chinese students. In addition, for Chinese students, morphological awareness plays a more important role than phonological awareness and orthographical skill in both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension.
Highlights
Reading comprehension refers to the text mental image construction that comes from the interaction between text content and readers’ cognition process through vocabulary knowledge, inference ability, word reading, working memory, and background knowledge (Snow, 2002; LervAag et al, 2018)
The current study mainly investigated the effect of morphological awareness (MA), orthographical skill (OS), and phonological awareness (PA), which were selected by extensive studies as metalinguistic knowledge in the reading field
Interrelations between reading comprehension achievement and metalinguistic knowledge were explored in three subgroups
Summary
Reading comprehension refers to the text mental image construction that comes from the interaction between text content and readers’ cognition process through vocabulary knowledge, inference ability, word reading, working memory, and background knowledge (Snow, 2002; LervAag et al, 2018). Metalinguistic knowledge, known as “metalinguistic awareness” or “metalinguistic ability” about language, in reading comprehension directly worked on a single-word or single-character cognition process. Regarding the single-word/single-character identification process, past studies mainly investigated the metalinguistic knowledge effect through. Chinese logographic scripts’ reading material has a very different cognition system from alphabetical scripts’ reading material in terms of grammatical knowledge, character structure, and pronunciation rules (Tsai et al, 2012; Ehrich et al, 2013). Little research has been conducted on the meta-analytic method to investigate the correlation between metalinguistic knowledge and reading comprehension in Chinese students whose background was logographical scripts. Whether the effects of three metalinguistic knowledge on reading comprehension were the same for Chinese students in different reading stages required further investigation. This study tries to investigate the correlation between three types of metalinguistic knowledge (PA, OS, and MA) and Chinese and English scripts’ reading comprehension in Chinese students
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
