Predicting Chinese children's reading development from kindergarten to second grade

The primary purpose of this longitudinal study is to determine how well a broad, comprehensive battery of screening measures administered in a kindergarten sample in China predicts Chinese children's reading achievement in the second grade.; The current study involved a total of 87 Chinese children, averaging five-years-old, from Dalian city in the northeast of China where the home language is Mandarin Chinese. A battery of measures, including phonological processing skills, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, oral language comprehension, and phonological distinctness were administered to the participants in June 2001 to assess several facets of their language abilities. In September 2003, I returned to China to posttest 69 of the original sample on the same measures as well as character knowledge, reading fluency, and visual-orthographic ability.; The results show that the second grade literacy of Chinese children could be predicted from measures collected early in kindergarten. The first canonical correlation accounts for 51% of the variance in a battery of second grade literacy measures. The strongest kindergarten predictors of literacy progress are the ability to reverse syllables in words two to four syllables in length and speed of picture naming; the strongest kindergarten predictors of phonological processing skills are syllable reversal and distinctness of phonological representations. Another major finding emerging from the current study is that children who at five years of age have poor-quality phonological representations [indistinct speech, distortions of inner syllables in compound words] are at risk for failing to learn to read Chinese.; The findings are expected to have implications for how best to teach Chinese children to learn to read. It may affect the teaching methods currently used and offer parents ways to help their children to learn at home. Moreover, the results are expected to lead to a better understanding of how normal Chinese reading acquisition develops and what cognitive skills underpin this development. The long-term goals are to improve methods for reading instruction for all children and to enable the early identification and treatment of at-risk children.