The Predictive Role of Grapho-Morphological Knowledge in Reading Comprehension for Beginning-Level L2 Chinese Learners.

Tianxu Chen,Keiko Koda,Sihui Ke

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.757934

Tianxu Chen, Keiko Koda + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.757934

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Abstract

Reading comprehension entails a set of distinct, yet interdependent cognitive, linguistic, and nonlinguistic processes. Previous second language (L2) Chinese studies have identified significant and positive impacts of grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and subcharacter (radical) levels on passage reading comprehension; however, little is known regarding how early L2 grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and radical levels jointly predict later L2 reading comprehension. This study aimed to fill this gap. One hundred and five beginning-level L2 Chinese collegiate learners were recruited, and completed two character-related and two radical-related tasks in Week 8, as well as one reading comprehension tasks in Week 18. The main findings, based on correlational and path analyses, suggested that L2 Chinese learners’ early character-level and radical-level grapho-morphological knowledge significantly predicted later reading comprehension, yet the interrelations among grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and radical levels were complex. Path analyses identified direct and indirect paths from early character-level grapho-morphological knowledge to later reading comprehension, as well as indirect paths from early radical-level grapho-morphological knowledge to later reading comprehension. Methodological and pedagogical implications for L2 Chinese reading research and practices are discussed.

Highlights

According to the componential view of reading, reading comprehension entails a set of distinct, yet interdependent cognitive, linguistic, and nonlinguistic skills from the lower levels to higher levels (Carr and Levy, 1990; Koda, 2005), among which grapho-morphological knowledge plays an important role in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading (Kirby and Bowers, 2017)
A few empirical cross-sectional studies have provided evidence supporting the positive effects of grapho-morphological knowledge in L2 Chinese reading comprehension, there is still a need for a comprehensive investigation that measures graphomorphological knowledge at character and radical levels and examines how character- and radical level graphomorphological knowledge contributes to later L2 Chinese reading comprehension from a longitudinal perspective
This study examined the relations between early graphomorphological knowledge and later reading comprehension in beginning-level collegiate L2 Chinese learners, and measured grapho-morphological knowledge at both character and radical levels

Summary

Introduction

According to the componential view of reading, reading comprehension entails a set of distinct, yet interdependent cognitive, linguistic, and nonlinguistic skills from the lower levels to higher levels (Carr and Levy, 1990; Koda, 2005), among which grapho-morphological knowledge plays an important role in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading (Kirby and Bowers, 2017). Previous cross-sectional studies have identified the positive effects of grapho-morphological knowledge on reading comprehension among L1 alphabetic (English) speakers (e.g., Levesque et al, 2017), L1 non-alphabetic (Chinese) speakers (e.g., Ku and Anderson, 2003; Tong et al, 2009; Zhang, 2017), Chinese-English bilingual children (e.g., Pasquarella et al, 2011), school-aged Chinese-speaking learners of English as a Foreign Language (e.g., Zhang and Koda, 2013), and American university Chinese heritage language learners (e.g., Zhang and Koda, 2018). Compared against cross-sectional studies based on correlational and observational evidence, longitudinal research is advantageous for it provides inferences about the causal relationship between grapho-morphological knowledge and reading development (see a review in Ke and Zhang, 2021). Later means a different point in time after the early period of learning a language (cf. Ortega and Iberri-Shea, 2005, p.32)

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