The Effects Of Phonological Awareness And Orthographic Awareness On Children EFL Reading Comprehension Ability: Mediation Through Vocabulary Knowledge And Syntactic Knowledge

Metalinguistic awareness is a critical component in reading development which is conceptualized as the ability of recognizing,analyzing and manipulating language forms.Previous studies have probed into the contributions of metalinguistic awareness at a unitary level,but the interactions of lower-level metalinguistic awareness and higherlevel linguistic knowledge in predicting reading seems to be ignored.Thus,the interconnected relationship of lower-level phonological awareness and orthographic awareness as well as vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge is explored in the present study.The current study aims to answer the following questions: 1)Does phonological awareness,orthographic awareness,vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge contribute to reading ability among children EFL learners? 2)To what extent and in what manner do phonological awareness,orthographic awareness,vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge contribute to reading ability among children EFL learners? The metalinguistic awareness and linguistic knowledge in children second language（L2）English reading comprehension ability were explored.Phonological awareness and orthographic awareness were included in metalinguistic awareness measures while vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge were involved in linguistic knowledge measures.100 sixth-grade Chinese students participated in Experiment 1 of the study and completed the measurement of metalinguistic awareness（phonological awareness and orthographic awareness）and linguistic knowledge（syntactic knowledge）.In Experiment 2,108 sixth-grade Chinese students were enrolled and finished the measurement of metalinguistic awareness（phonological awareness and orthographic awareness）and linguistic knowledge（vocabulary knowledge）.The collected data were analyzed in SPSS 26.0,Amos 23.0 and STATA 16.0.The results exhibited the bidirectional relationship between phonological awareness and orthographic awareness in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.Experiment 1 found that all the measures were significantly correlated with each other except for orthographic awareness and reading comprehension ability.In path analysis,both metalinguistic awareness and syntactic knowledge collectively contributed to reading comprehension ability.Phonological awareness had a significant direct effect on reading comprehension ability which was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension ability.Nevertheless,orthographic awareness exerted only indirect effect on reading comprehension ability which was fully mediated by syntactic knowledge.Thus,syntactic knowledge mediated the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension.In Experiment 2,the results demonstrated the significant correlations of all the measures.The path analysis revealed the collective contributions of metalinguistic awareness and vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension ability.Orthographic awareness was found to have the strongest predicting power.It contributed to the reading comprehension ability both directly and indirectly,while phonological awareness had only indirect effect on reading comprehension ability.Vocabulary knowledge seems to mediate the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension.The mediation of vocabulary knowledge between metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension was relatively stronger than syntactic knowledge in Experiment 1.The study suggests that lower-level metalinguistic awareness may improve higher-level vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge which could enhance reading comprehension ability subsequently.Further,the prediction of lower-level metalinguistic awareness to L2 reading is stronger than higher-level vocabulary knowledge and syntactic knowledge to reading outcomes.Moreover,metalinguistic awareness would have stronger facilitation on reading comprehension ability with the improvement of vocabulary knowledge.In addition,L2 readers may depend on different strategies of lower-level decoding to achieve higherorder local meaning information and global meaning construction,with low-proficiency readers depending on phonological strategies and high-proficiency readers relying on orthographic strategies.The current study verified the linguistic mechanism of L2 reading comprehension;provided new empirical evidence to the interactions of lower-level metalinguistic awareness and higher-level linguistic knowledge,and made a unique contribution to the mediation of higher-level linguistic knowledge between lower-level metalinguistic awareness and L2 reading comprehension.Additionally,the present study has theoretical and applied implications for language learning and teaching.