7 - Emergent literacy skills in Chinese

Summary

Emergent literacy skills are “precursors of formal reading that have their origins early in the life of a child” (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001: 12). Reading, unlike spoken language, almost never develops in the absence of formal teaching (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 2000). This is especially true for Chinese character recognition (Li & Rao, 2000). Whereas most readers of alphabets can eventually assimilate letter–phoneme correspondences, which are relatively regular, and use these correspondence rules to learn to read new words on their own, orthography–phonology correspondence rules in Chinese are much less reliable (e.g. Ho, Wong & Chan, 1999). Despite the fact that supportive teaching is necessary for reading acquisition, however, there is also strong evidence that children's cognitive abilities contribute to their reading development. Below, we first give an overview of environmental factors that may impact on Chinese children's reading development. We then review the cognitive abilities of Chinese children that have been demonstrated to predict very early reading skill.

Many aspects of the environment may affect early Chinese literacy development (Cheung & Ng, 2003). Here, we mention four of them. First, varying linguistic environments can affect literacy acquisition (Bialystok, 2001). Across Chinese societies, spoken Chinese languages are sometimes mutually unintelligible. However, formal written Chinese uniformly represents Mandarin Chinese. Thus, mapping oral to written Chinese may be more challenging for those whose native language is Cantonese as compared to Mandarin, for instance (Cheung & Ng, 2003).