Morphological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge, and Spelling Errors: Keys to Understanding Early Chinese Literacy Acquisition

This study aimed at investigating the possible predictors of three literacy skills, namely word reading, dictation, and reading comprehension. Possible predictors investigated included phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, naming speed, and a specific assessment of different types of spelling errors. The study was from our longitudinal sample of Chinese children, using the metalinguistic skills in the first phase to predict literacy skills in both the first (T1) and the second (T2) phase. One-hundred-and-seventy-one children, who participated in both phases of the study, were included in the analysis. Results are listed below:

	Reading		Dictation		Reading comprehension
	Concurrent	Subsequent	Concurrent	Subsequent	Concurrent	Subsequent
Morphological awareness	v	v	v		v	v
Orthographical knowledge	v	v	v		v
Speeded naming	v	v				v
Phonological awareness			v	v
Spelling errors
-morpho-lexical errors	v	v	v	v	v	v
-orthographical errors	v	v		v	v	v
-phonological errors			v	v

The results in general showed that morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge are most predictive of literacy skills. Naming speed was predictive of reading skills as well as subsequent comprehension skills, while phonological awareness was only predictive of dictation skills. The patterns of errors made by children in writing were similar. While both morpho-lexical and orthographic errors predicted most of the literacy skills, phonological errors were only predictive of dictation skills. This shows that Hong Kong Chinese children seldom use phonological cues to learn Chinese. The results in general underscore the importance of morphological awareness in terms of reading and writing Chinese. Teaching Chinese words analytically (i.e., breaking words into individual characters, or morphemes) is especially encouraged.

Tong, X., McBride-Chang, C., Shu, H., & Wong, A. M.-Y. (2009). Morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and spelling errors: Keys to understanding early Chinese literacy acquisition. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13, 426-452.