Psychological Development and Education ›› 2010, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (2): 144-152.

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The Roles of Various Character Decoding Skills in Children’s Reading Acquisition

HU Tian-ting1, TAO Sha1, XU Qin-mei2, BI Hong-yan3   

  1. 1. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875;
    2. Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310028;
    3. Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101
  • Online:2010-03-15 Published:2010-03-15

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Abstract: Learning how to decode the print is the p rimary task for children after entering into elementary school. Decoding is about converting w ritten symbols into sound and meaning.Researchers often tested decoding skills by word reading accuracy,grapheme-phoneme corresponding rules(GPC rules)using and word reading fluency.In alphabetic languages such as English,decoding was repeatedly revealed as playing an important role in reading for early graders.However,the importance might decrease as children entered into higher grades.In Chinese,there are a large number of semantic-phonetic compound characters,which contain a semantic component that gives a clue to meaning and a phonetic component that may give a clue to pronunciation.In contrast to English,there are no direct and transparent corresponding rules like GPC for Chinese character reading.Chinese character decoding skills also can be examined with respect to character reading accuracy,Chinese character orthography-phonology and orthography-semantic connection rules and character reading fluency.The p resent study aimed to examine the roles of various Chinese character decoding skills in Chinese reading comprehension among native Chinese-speaking children in grade 2 and grade 4.One hundred and two 2nd graders(45 boys,57 girls,meanage=8.33 years;SD=0.33)and 106 4th graders(50 boys,56 girls,meanage=10143 years;SD=0.35)completed Chinese language comprehension test,Chinese reading comprehension test,Chinese character reading accuracy test,Chinese character reading fluency test,phonetic decoding and semantic radical decoding test.Results showed that after controlling for the effects of Chinese language comprehension,Chinese character decoding skills significantly accounted for considerable amount of variance of Chinese reading comprehension at both 2nd grade and 4th grade.Among the four character decoding skills,after controlling for the effects of language comprehension and other Chinese character decoding skills,character reading accuracy significantly accounted for unique variance of Chinese reading comprehension in both 2nd grade and 4th grade;character reading fluency accounted for unique variance of Chinese reading comp rehension in the 2nd grade,but not in the 4th grade;phonetic decoding and semantic decoding didn't account for unique variance in either grades significantly.These results were discussed with respect to the educational implications of Chinese reading instruction in elementary grades.

Key words: reading comp rehension, decoding, reading accuracy, reading fluency, pupil

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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