| Word reading is a basic reading skill which children acquire in the early literacy education.It is generally believed that word reading involves a series of linguistic cognitive skills including metalinguistic awareness and rapid automatic naming.Previous studies mostly focused on the effects of few linguistic cognitive skills on word reading.Most of the studies focused on English learners of alphabetic language,while limited studies focused on Chinese ESL learners whose mother tongue is non-alphabetic.In addition,few studies have examined the impact on English word reading from the perspective of development.With the effects of mother tongue experience and unfavorable English studying environment,the influence of linguistic cognitive skills on English word reading inevitably features its uniqueness.Hence,this study combined cross-sectional study with one-year longitudinal study to investigate the effects of Chinese and English metalinguistic awareness and rapid automatic naming on English word reading in Chinese mainland junior high school ESL students,and comprehensively examine their influence on the development of English word reading,with a view to revealing the developmental model of Chinese students’English word reading.Specifically,bilingual linguistic cognitive skills involved included orthographic awareness,morphological awareness and rapid automatic naming in Chinese as well as phonological awareness,orthographic awareness,morphological awareness and rapid automatic naming in English.Across grades,Chinese metalinguistic awareness and rapid automatic naming produced indirect effects on English word reading through English metalinguistic awareness and rapid automatic naming whereas those in English made direct contributions to English word reading.Three stages were showed in the developmental pattern of Chinese students’English word reading.In the early stage,students mainly relied on English phonological awareness.In the middle stage,they coordinated and used English phonological awareness,English orthographic awareness and English morphological awareness.In the later stage,they relied most on English morphological awareness.The results of the one-year longitudinal study of seventh-grade students was almost consistent with the results of the cross-sectional study.That is,Chinese metalinguistic awareness and rapid automatic naming refused to directly affect English word reading and the variables predicting eighth-grade students’English real word reading were the same as those in cross-sectional study.However,there was a slight change in the variables predicting the English pseudoword decoding in eighth graders.Besides the phonological awareness and morphological awareness in English,Chinese morphological awareness predicted eighth-grade students’English pseudoword decoding surprisingly.The findings indicate that English word reading in Chinese mainland students has universal characteristics of reading but has its unique model of processing.This study could provide implications for the teaching of English word reading. |
