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More than fifteen million native Chinese-speaking children are at risk for reading difficulties (RD), making effective Chinese reading interventions crucial for enhancing individual and societal well-being. A total of 51 studies from 2,015 children aged 6 to 13 years were included in the current meta-analysis to examine what works for reading interventions among Chinese children at risk for RD. For decoding outcomes, results indicated positive effects of interventions targeting decoding skills, g = 1.18, meta-linguistic skills, g = 0.57, and cognitive skills, g = 0.52. Interventions targeting decoding skills showed a stronger effect than those targeting cognitive skills. Interventions solely targeting decoding skills were as effective as multi-component interventions (e.g., combining decoding and meta-linguistic skills). For reading comprehension outcomes, results indicated positive effects of interventions targeting decoding skills, g = 0.64, and meta-linguistic skills, g = 0.79, but not of those targeting cognitive skills, g = - 0.08. Interventions targeting decoding skills were more effective than those targeting cognitive skills. These findings, taken together, suggest that compared to cognitive skills, interventions targeting decoding or meta-linguistic skills are consistently effective for improving decoding and reading comprehension. Decoding seems to be the active ingredient for successful reading interventions. Implications for future research were also discussed.

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences, collocations in particular, can be modified with words intervening in between the individual constituents (e.g. "save energy [right arrow] save all forms of energy"). For some collocations, their nonadjacent forms are equally, and even more frequently used than their adjacent form. Despite this, it remains almost unknown whether the processing advantage and sensitivity to phrase frequencies persist in nonadjacent collocations in children. Based on reading times in a self-paced reading experiment, the current study found that two age groups -- third and sixth graders -- exhibited a processing advantage for Chinese collocations and sensitivity to phrase frequencies, with two and even four Chinese characters inserted in the middle. The persistence of processing advantage and sensitivity was affected by insertion length as well as age. These results are in line with a usage-based theoretical approach to language learning, processing and use.

In second language (L2) reading strategy research, two concerns need addressing: (1) the discrepancy in assessing strategy use between written surveys and verbal reports, and (2) the effect of using strategies on readers' comprehension outcomes when different types of comprehension tasks are utilized. The present study addressed these concerns by asking five more-proficient and five less-proficient Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) university learners to read two domain-specific texts while assessing their strategy use. The results from both quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed a "gap" between the survey and verbal reports for assessing L2 reading strategy use. Additionally, the contribution of strategies to the readers' comprehension was found to vary by comprehension task type. Similarly, the variety of strategy use had a strong association with the readers' performance on only one of three types of comprehension tasks, free recall. The findings hold important implications on L2 reading strategy instruction.

Purpose: This study aims to examine whether binocular vision plays a facilitating or impeding role in lexical processing during sentence reading in Chinese. Method: Adopting the revised boundary paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the parafoveal and foveal viewing conditions (monocular vs. binocular) of target words (high- vs. low-frequency) within sentences. Forty participants (30 females, mean age = 19.9 years) were recruited to read these sentences and their eye movements were monitored. Results: Through directly comparing the eye movement measures in different viewing conditions, the results indicated that compared with monocular viewing, binocular viewing resulted in shorter fixation durations, thereby facilitating lexical processing. Critically, in addition to the higher information encoding speed toward the currently fixated word in the fovea, the more efficient preprocessing of the upcoming text to the right of fixation in the parafovea may also contribute to the superiority of binocular vision over monocular. Conclusion: Our findings provide the first evidence to support the binocular advantages in Chinese reading, which reveals that high-quality visual input from binocular vision plays a vital role in fluent and efficient written text reading.

In this collective essay the authors consider the nature and consequences of reading and researching across difference in an international and intergenerational team, whose core members are focused on understanding how curriculum operates and the nature of textbook representation of diversity in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. Examining textbook reading across and about difference as senior and junior curriculum theorists, emerging educational researchers, and recent secondary school graduates with varied international and cross-border experiences, the authors consider how their unique positions and experiences--as well as the political and social context of schooling, and the abstraction, simplification, and reduction of reality which textbook production entails--influences understandings of the value of curriculum theory and textbook research. The insights of this essay shed light on such topics as how textbooks are seen across difference, read in academic and school settings, experienced based on identity and subjectivity, and taken up in understanding broader nation-state politics. In sum, the authors critically ask here what textbooks and textbook research are 'for' from an international view, given the dynamic ways that reading and collaborative scholarship work.

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not straightforward. We investigated Chinese readers' processing of frequently occurring multiconstituent units (MCUs), that is, linguistic units composed of more than a single word, that might be represented lexically as a single representation. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the linguistic category of a two-constituent Chinese string (word, MCU, or phrase) and the preview of its second constituent (identical or pseudocharacter) using the boundary paradigm with the boundary located before the two-constituent string. A robust preview effect was obtained when the second constituent, alongside the first, formed a word or MCU, but not a phrase, suggesting that frequently occurring MCUs are lexicalized and processed parafoveally as single units during reading. In Experiment 2, we further manipulated the phrase type of a two-constituent but three-character Chinese string (idiom with a one-character modifier and a two-character noun, or matched phrase) and the preview of the second constituent noun (identity or pseudocharacter). A greater preview effect was obtained for idioms than phrases, indicating that idioms are processed to a greater extent in the parafovea than matched phrases. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that lexical identification processes in Chinese can be operationalized over linguistic units that are larger than an individual word.

This paper's objective is to give a thorough summary of research on the reading behavior of Chinese primary and secondary school students. The majority of existing research in this field focuses on the importance of extensive reading, the status quo of reading practices among Chinese students, factors that influence student reading behavior, and techniques for enhancing student reading accomplishment. It is proposed that this review will generate more interest in the development of basic education students' reading skills.

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The character-frequency effects, however, were facilitatory for naming but inhibitory for both lexical decision and reading. Further correlational analyses indicated that participants' performance (as measured using overall response latencies and the sizes of the frequency effects) was not consistent across tasks but was relatively reliable within the lexical-decision and reading tasks. These findings are discussed in relation to what is known about the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts, word-identification tasks, and models of word identification.

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced logographic language). Participants in two experiments read intact sentences and sentences containing transposed-character nonwords while their eye movements were monitored. Experiment 1 manipulated the distance between the transposed characters (adjacent vs. nonadjacent) within three-character words. Reading times were longer when nonadjacent characters were transposed compared with adjacent characters. Also, for adjacent character transpositions, a word-beginning character transposition led to longer reading times than a word-ending character transposition. Experiment 2 manipulated orthogonally character transposition distance (adjacent vs. nonadjacent) and position within four-character words, including the beginning versus the last character. Reading times were longer when the transposition involves the first character than when involves the ending character. Fixation durations on the target regions in the nonadjacent character transposition condition were longer than those in the adjacent character transposition condition. Taken together, these results reveal robust effects of both the initial character position and transposed-character distance in Chinese reading. Thus, the privileged status of the initial character is intrinsically related to how we access lexical information.

This paper gives a short analysis of the nature of reading. Though it is generally believed that reading involves perceiving the written form of language, the term reading has not been clearly defined up to date. It is possible to see reading as a process, or to examine the product of that process. Three reading models, namely Bottom-up Model, Top-down Model and Interactive Model, are discussed in this paper.

The purpose of this study was to examine the character identification strategies of Chinese children during their oral reading of a continuous text. Eighteen second graders' oral reading of a story, as well as an interview about their decoding strategies, were audiotaped and transcribed. The results generally converged with those of previous oral reading research in alphabetic languages. Children, even poor readers, consistently used information available within characters and information from context to identify unfamiliar characters. This study suggests that Chinese children as young as second grade can apply appropriate strategies to decode their logographic writing system. In the interview after reading, children were able to describe their thinking processes while decoding unfamiliar characters. Their descriptions were usually consistent with behavior observed during oral reading, which indicates a high level of metalinguistic awareness. (Contains 1 figure, 1 footnote and 6 tables.)

Mastery of English in China has gathered increased prominence due to the need to foster cultural, political, and economic connections worldwide. Reading is an obvious skill of vital importance for advancing efforts as a player in the world economy. The present article examines research published in academic journals in Chinese and English to specifically explore the variables investigated and underscore the directions of future research. Through the detailed summary, the authors assert that more research should examine the effects of passage content, topic familiarity, and metacognition and offer corresponding implications for reading material developers and test constructors in China.

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words either had a symmetrical left-right structure or a symmetrical top-bottom structure. Landing positions were very similar when readers initially fixated the target words with left-right and top-bottom structures. They targeted their initial saccades to the word centre in single fixation cases and to the word beginning in multiple fixation cases. Furthermore, there was a highly reliable effect that readers were more likely to target the lower half of a character than the upper half of the character regardless of its structure. The results suggest some vertical differentiation in initial saccadic targeting in Chinese reading, but that character structure does not modulate such targeting. (Contains 4 tables, 5 figures, and 1 note.)

This is a compilation of reports from international research correspondents on the topic of emergent reading. The report includes 14 separate reports on Nigeria, China, Hong Kong, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Mexico, United States, Argentina, and Chile. Overall, reports on the topic of emergent readers have delineated a range of attention to it. Some countries, such as Oman, do not use "emergent reader" at all. Some, such as Italy, do not give much attention to that category of learners, whereas others, such as Israel and Mexico, have increased attention to that group. There are also countries, such as Canada and Singapore, where formal programs have been put in place to work with emergent readers in various ways and at various age levels. One thing mentioned repeatedly throughout these reports is the role socioeconomic status plays for emergent readers. Many of the educators that participated in these reports have pointed out the importance of access to materials and resources for students' academic success and the advantages that more privileged students typically have. In a similar vein, there also seems to be a thread between reports about the role of electronic media in emergent-reading engagement.

Shows that English as a foreign language (EFL) students in mainland China believe that their command of English vocabulary plays a crucial role in their reading comprehension. Suggests the final replacement of linguistic knowledge by conceptual or sociocultural knowledge as the top factor that affects their reading comprehension seems to take place one year after beginning of the tertiary EFL course. (SG)

Investigates Chinese dyslexic children's efficiency in employing phonological strategies in reading and the effectiveness of training phonological strategies in improving reading performance. Finds subjects did not use the phonological strategies as efficiently as Chinese average readers, and the training program was effective in significantly improving the experimental group's reading performance. (RS)

This article reports on a principle-based evaluation of eight dedicated extensive reading coursebooks published in mainland China and used in many universities across the country. The aim is to determine the extent to which these coursebooks reflect a core set of nine second language acquisition and extensive reading principles. Our analysis shows that while some of the coursebooks contain features that comply with these principles to an extent, the rest exhibit features of traditional intensive reading coursebooks. Most of these coursebooks contain reading materials that are linguistically too demanding and tasks that are cognitively and affectively unappealing. As a result, they are unlikely to achieve their designated purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present 4-year longitudinal study examined preschool predictors of Grade 1 dyslexia status in a Chinese population in Hong Kong where children started learning to read at the age of three. Seventy-five and 39 Chinese children with high and low familial risk respectively were tested on Chinese word reading, oral language skills, morphological awareness, phonological skills, rapid naming, and print-related skills from age 4 to 6 and a standardized dyslexia test at age 7. Results showed that children of the high risk group performed significantly worse than the low risk group in Chinese literacy, phonological awareness, and orthographic skills at age 7. All the children with dyslexia had word reading difficulties in at least one preschool year. Results of the logistic regression showed that preschool verbal production, syllable deletion, and letter naming were the best predictors of dyslexia outcome at age 7. As in alphabetic languages, preschool oral language skills like verbal production, phonological skills, and print-related skills are the most significant predictors of children's later reading difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the Chinese reading patterns of students with learning disabilities (LD). The performances of students with LD in reading the three categories of Chinese characters were particularly analysed: regular, irregular, and pseudo-characters. Fifty-three students with LD in reading and 44 students without LD of Year 4 were selected from five Hong Kong primary schools. Their abilities for reading Chinese characters were measured using Rasch analysis. Both types of students found regular characters as the easiest to read. Students without LD showed better performance in reading irregular characters than pseudo-characters, whereas students with LD exhibited no significant performance difference in reading these two categories. The implication of these results is that the students without LD might rely on using the orthographic processing than that of phonological processing to read. On the other hand, students with LD might not have the preference of using the orthographic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language-use strategies are considered potentially effective approaches that learners select to accomplish a second- or foreign-language task. In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation of research concerned with learners' strategy use at different levels of language ability and the influence of L1 learner strategies on L2 language learning. The present study, however, looked at an underresearched topic: what strategies EFL learners adopted to read two types of articles (general and subject-specific) in both testing and nontesting contexts. Ninety-two Chinese-major university students taking a Journalistic English course participated in the study. Questionnaires with follow-up interviews, and retrospective self-reports were employed. The results showed that the participants used similar strategies but to different degrees while reading general and subject-specific articles and taking reading comprehension tests. Also, the participants' comprehension of the two types of reading genres in testing and nontesting situations was, in part, determined by their information-processing stages and accessibility of schemata. When attempts to use cognitive strategies failed, strategies for monitoring, regulating, and managing information were adopted to compensate for the incomprehension of articles. The findings suggest that effective teaching for intermediate university-level EFL students like the sample group should encompass a combination of subject-specific language and content reinforcement followed by strategic reading instruction using subject-specific articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the development of reading in young Chinese learners of English in Hong Kong by comparing the effects of a guided reading intervention to an alternative treatment based on reading from e-books and a no-treatment control group. The key features of the guided reading intervention included: instruction on reading strategies and opportunities for interaction for negotiation of meaning with peers. The e-book reading focused on reading stories from CD-ROMs with embedded instructional features including opportunities to hear the stories and engage in routine word and text games but without any interaction with peers or any guidance from a teacher. Two hundred and five children, aged 9–10 years, from six primary schools in Hong Kong were stratified for gender and reading proficiency in English and randomly assigned to one of the three groups: the guided reading group, the e-book reading group and the no-treatment control group. The treatments were delivered as additional reading sessions on top of normal classroom instruction. Pre- and post-intervention tests revealed that children in the guided reading group significantly improved their reading comprehension and reading accuracy scores compared to the no-treatment control group. The children in the e-book reading group did not improve significantly compared to the no-treatment group in reading comprehension although there was significant improvement in reading accuracy. However, there was no significant difference between the children in the guided reading group and the e-book reading group ineither reading comprehension or reading accuracy scores. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed in the context of teaching English in primary schools in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Problem Statement: Students' metacognition can play a critical role in their reading learning, and their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies has attracted the interest of both educational researchers and teachers. However, there is not an existing questionnaire for the research of students' metacognition on reading in China. An instrument is needed to assess students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in the Chinese context. Purpose of Study: The aim of the present research is to validate the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory in the Chinese educational context (MARSI-CN). This inventory can be used by Chinese teachers to improve their students' reading skills. Methods: The present research was comprised of two pilot studies and one main study. In the first pilot study, a translated version of the original questionnaire was administered to a sample of 216 students in six different middle schools, and then in the second pilot study, a revised version of the initial translation was tried out on 494 students. Finally, in the main study, the revised MARSI-CN was tested with 2119 students. In the second pilot study phase, exploratory factor analysis was applied, and in the main study, confirmatory factor analysis was carried out. Findings and Results: A three-factor structure of the MARSI-CN resulted from the exploratory factor analysis on the second pilot study data. The consecutive confirmatory factor analysis - building on data from the main study - confirmed the three-factor structure and reflected good fit indices (X²/df =1.613, RMSEA= .035, TLI= .959, GFI= .960, CFI= .966). Internal consistency in the questionnaire, as measured with Cronbach's Alpha, was .863. Test-retest reliability was also high (r= .91, p< .01). Conclusions and Recommendations: The results from the study help to conclude that the translated and adapted instrument MARSI-CN reflects good reliability and validity, and that it can be used in research on students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in Chinese middle schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low-frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word-based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye-movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined semantic radical awareness in Chinese dyslexic children and how such awareness related to Chinese word reading. A group of Chinese dyslexic children (with a mean age of 10 years) and two control groups (with mean ages of 10 years 1 month and 7 years 7 months, respectively) were tested on Chinese word reading, semantic categorization skill, and positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals. Results showed that the dyslexia group performed significantly worse than the reading-level control group in producing characters with the same semantic radicals. They also made less effective use of high frequency, lexical, and transparent semantic radicals than did age controls. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that awareness of various aspects of semantic radical knowledge was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading. These results suggest that weakness in semantic radical awareness of Chinese dyslexic children may reflect their poor quality of lexical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the relationship between the reading attainment scores of students and key family environmental factors in Chinese and non-Chinese communities. It explores six family environmental factors which include parents' evaluation of their offspring's early literacy skills, early home literacy activities (EHLA), and parental attitudes toward reading and their reading habits. Furthermore, the study formally assesses the reading attainment of all participating students using standardized procedures of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2006 reading attainment survey.

The article presents a study which compares the reading performance of primary students in Hong Kong, China with that in developed countries around the world. Highlights of the study include student factors that influence achievement, reading habits of students outside school, and home reading activities. Details on the objective of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Students' Attitudes Toward Reading (SATR) and Students' Reading Self-Concept (SRSC) are also considered.

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability, cognitive ability, and metacognitive strategic competence. A profile of good readers follows a review of the literature. With a special reference to second language (L2) reading research and pedagogy in China, the author argues that a key difference between first language and L2 readers is that L2 readers typically have a gap between their L2 proficiency and their knowledge or conceptual maturation, and this tension determines to some degree the characteristics of good versus poor L2 readers. By examining L2 reading research in the country, the author proposes some areas worth exploring in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]