Chinese Esl Children's Word Decoding Skills And Reading The Relationship Between Cross-language Study

Reading is an essential skill to study and work. Goswami thought that two factors may affect the development of reading ability: the first one is linguistic characteristics; the second one is cognitive process. To obtain corresponding reading ability, then, do different writing systems require the same cognitive processing skills? In the past 30 years, a large number of west research results about this issue show that the development of reading skills not only depends on the cognitive process (central processing hypothesis), but also is influenced by the linguistic characteristics (language dependent hypothesis). Reading skill development of different writing systems has both cross-language consistencies and cross-language differences. However, most of these conclusions are from cross-language researches of alphabetic writing systems, while the studies between non-alphabetic and alphabetic writing systems are comparatively less. Then, how are cross-language consistencies and cross-language differences between non-alphabetic and alphabetic writing systems? This paper will explore these issues for Chinese ESL children, including three studies:Study one investigated the relationship between bilingual phonological, orthographic and morpheme awareness and bilingual reading ability for Chinese ESL children. The study found that for Chinese ESL children, there is high correlation between two languages in morpheme and phonological awareness, but there is not correlation between two languages in orthographic awareness. The role of word decoding skills in different linguistic systems has different forecasting models: Chinese morpheme awareness has independent forecasting role in Chinese reading; English morpheme and phonological awareness have independent forecasting role in English reading. At the same time, there are significant cross-language migrations: English phonological awareness predicts Chinese reading; Chinese morpheme awareness predicts English reading.Study two investigated the relationship between bilingual phonological, orthographic and morpheme awareness and bilingual reading ability for Chinese dyslexia ESL children. The study found that for Chinese ESL children, children who have decoding difficulties in the first language will also encounter decoding difficulties in the second language, but the difficulties are different: Chinese reading has main obstacles in orthographic and semantic processing; English reading has main obstacles in phonological and semantic processing. These conclusions strongly support central processing hypothesis. However, the existence of a small number of reading separation children fully confirms language dependent hypothesis.Research three investigated relationship between bilingual phonological, orthographic and morpheme awareness and bilingual reading ability for Chinese reading separation ESL children. The study found that semantic processing skills plays a central role in Chinese reading, and the development of semantic processing skills is not affected by phonological processing skills; phonological processing skills plays a central role in English reading and the development of semantic processing skills is affected by phonological processing skills. The reason of English and Chinese reading separation phenomenon is due to different roles and different relationships of phonological processing skill and semantic processing skill in two language systems reading.