Abstract
This study investigated the association between syntactic awareness and L2 Chinese passage-level reading comprehension among 209 Chinese as a second language adult-learners. The participants were administered a character knowledge test, a vocabulary knowledge test, a morphological awareness test, a grammatical judgment and correction test, a word order test, and two reading comprehension tests (multiple-choice questions and cloze test). Partial correlation analyses showed that the participants’ performance in two syntactic awareness tasks were significantly positively correlated with their passage-level reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses revealed that syntactic awareness made a unique contribution to L2 Chinese reading even when the effects of age, major, gender, length of learning Chinese, character knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness were controlled for. In addition, the word order knowledge had a stronger predicting power to L2 Chinese reading comprehension compared to the grammatical judgment/correction ability.
Highlights
Syntactic awareness refers to an understanding and application of the grammatical structure of the language (Tunmer and Hoover, 1992)
The present study aimed to investigate the relative contribution of two syntactic components to two measures of L2 Chinese reading comprehension
The findings suggested that the strong correlation between syntactic awareness and discourse-level reading comprehension was beyond the contribution of character knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and background variables such as age, major, gender, and length of learning
Summary
Syntactic awareness refers to an understanding and application of the grammatical structure of the language (Tunmer and Hoover, 1992). It has been found to contribute significantly to children and adults’ performance in word decoding, word reading, and text comprehension 2003; Muter et al, 2004; Nation and Snowling, 2004). Recent research in both L2 English and L1 Chinese reading (Guo et al, 2011; Zhang, 2012; Yeung et al, 2013; Tong and McBride, 2017; Tong et al, 2021; Zhao et al, 2021a) has demonstrated the significant role syntactic awareness was playing in reading comprehension. Few empirical studies have been carried out on the role of the syntactic skills in L2 Chinese reading comprehension among adult learners.
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