This chapter delineates features of the Chinese language and orthography critical to learning to read. Such a description is to serve as a basis for the studies presented in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, and to draw educators’ attention to their knowledge about the basics of Chinese linguistics, especially those specialized in educating children in Chinese OWI programs. In foreign language education, the ACTFL/CAEP 1 Standards (ACTFL, 2015) describe in detail the standards for the knowledge base that a foreign language teacher should possess, which is consisted of content knowledge, including foreign language proficiency as well as cultures, linguistics, literatures, and concepts from other disciplines, and knowledge about the learner and learning (language acquisition theories and knowledge of students and their needs), among other standards. Therefore, understanding the basics of Chinese language and orthography should be indispensable for teachers and teacher education in that it will help predict where learning difficulties may occur and enable teachers to take well-reasoned approaches to language and literacy instruction (e.g., Fillmore & Snow, 2000; Lü & Lavadenz, 2014).

However, as the field of CSL is relatively young, “Chinese programs in general do not have the advantages of commonly agreed-upon approaches to literacy that are found in mainstream first language (L1) English language programs or in programs for more commonly taught foreign languages (L2)”, Curtain et al. (2016, p. 1) noted, and “few materials give guidance on basic methods of teaching literacy to students who are beginning their study of Chinese, especially at the elementary and middle school levels” (ibid.). In addition, K–12 Chinese teachers, though many may be native speakers of Chinese and proficient in English, typically do not have a solid background in Chinese linguistics, even after they have cleared the various state certification requirements. This is perhaps a major contributing factor for particularly novice teachers’ desire for “large ‘doses’ of practical pedagogical strategies”; they typically have less time, patience, or opportunities for thoughtful reflection grounded in the language-specific pedagogic knowledge (Lü & Lavadenz, 2014). For example, one of the state credentialed Chinese teachers in the focal program revealed to me that she did not feel qualified to teach the language (Chinese) “Because I don’t have a solid understanding of the language itself in order to teach it”, others commented that “since I obtained my credential in America, many concepts and practices were focused on the English language, and I have to remind myself that the research may be different when it comes to Mandarin” (Interview with the teachers on February 5, 2017). It has been recognized that few Chinese teacher preparation programs in the United States have the room or staffing capacity for substantial attention to pedagogy that is specific to Chinese as an L2 (Asia Society, 2010).

Additionally, Chinese teachers in an OWI program are not only students’ primary educators, but oftentimes their only point of contact with the language, literacy, and culture. Therefore, Chinese teachers also play a vital role in communicating with the parents about the language. Nevertheless, it is hardly an exaggerated statement to say that such a task is extremely challenging without explicitly studying the subject.

With these considerations in mind, this chapter seeks to present a succinct description of the major characteristics of the Chinese language and its orthography. The Chinese language system has its unique characteristics, and its orthography presents one of the highest contrasts to that of an alphabetic one (Perfetti & Dunlap, 2008). A clear description of these characteristics, therefore, will pave the way for discussing their implications for learning to read Chinese.

The Chinese Language

The word Chinese refers to a family of related language varieties, rather than a single language. There are seven major dialect groups (Yuan, 1961): the Northern dialects (also known as Mandarin dialects), 吴 Wú, 赣 Gàn, 湘 Xiāng, 客家 Kèjiā (or Hakka), 粤 Yuè, and 闽 Mǐn. An estimated 71.5% of the Chinese population are speakers of the northern dialects, and they reside across the north as well as southwest of China (Ramsey, 1989, p. 87).

What is commonly known as Mandarin in the English-speaking world is actually a designation of Standard Chinese (Norman, 1988, p. 135). The notion of Standard Chinese was conceived as part of the language reform effort initiated by the government of the Republic of China in the 1920s; it was termed as 国语 guóyǔ “the national language”, a codified form based on the Beijing dialect for pronunciation, and exemplary modern vernacular literature as its basis for grammar. The name guóyǔ is still being used in Taiwan when referring to the standard language, but it has been promulgated as 普通话 pŭtōnghuà “the common language” in Mainland China since 1955 (Zhang, 1955) and 华语 huáyǔ “the Chinese language” in Singapore.

Phonology

The basic spoken unit of Chinese is a syllable; there are four possible internal syllable structures for Chinese, V, CV, VC, and CVC (V: vowel; C: consonant; Zhu & Dodd, 2000). Twenty-one initial phonemes can occupy the consonant slot before the vowel; the vowel slot can be occupied with either one of the six single vowels or one of the four diphthongs, and the ending consonant slot can be filled with one of the two final consonants, n and ng. To illustrate, the structures for the syllables for zhōng “middle”, and lái “to come”, are CVC and CV, respectively. The Chinese phonological structure is simple, especially in comparison to English. The syllable structures for even simple words in English can be rather complicated, for instance, sixth is CVCCC and twelfth is CCVCCCC.

In Chinese, lexical tone, a suprasegmental 2 feature, is attached to the main vowel. There are four pitched tones (high-level, high-rising, falling-rising, and high-falling, indicated by tonal marks on the main vowel as ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ) and a neutral tone, which is not marked with a diacritic. What is also remarkable about the Chinese phonology is that as complex as the tonal system appears to be, there is a very limited number of syllables. One estimate is just 404 when tones are not taken into consideration (Duanmu, 2007, pp. 319–329), and about 1277 when tones are counted (DeFrancis, 1984, p. 42). By contrast, English has over 8000 syllables (DeFrancis, 1984, p. 42).

Partly due to the relatively small sound inventory, Standard Chinese has a great number of homophones, which refer to words with the same pronunciation but different meaning (therefore representing different morphemes). For instance, the tonal syllable shì corresponds to more than ten different morphemes represented by different characters, examples include 事 “issue”, 视 “vision”, 试 “to try”, 室 “room”, 饰 “to decorate”, 适 “to adapt to”, 示 “to demonstrate”, 释 “to explain”, 市 “city”, 柿 “persimmon”. On average, a tonal syllable is represented by about five characters/morphemes; in contrast, English syllable is represented by on average 1.4 word spellings (Duanmu, 2007, p. 94). However, in Standard Chinese, homophones are not evenly distributed across all syllables. Duanmu (2007, pp. 94–95) provided a corpus-based analysis and listed 15 most frequent syllables in terms of homophone density. The top one, yi, represents more than 100 words when tone is disregarded. However, about 20% of the 1277 tonal syllables do not have a homophone, and some of the most frequently used words are also unique in speech and are uniquely represented by a single character (DeFrancis, 1984, p. 184), such as 我 wǒ “I”, 牛 niú “ox”.

In summary, Standard Chinese is a tonal language and has a relatively simple syllable structure and a small sound inventory. But its syllable-morpheme/character mapping is complicated by the wide presence of homophones.

Morphology

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. In Chinese, a morpheme can be represented by one syllable, which is graphically encoded as a character. For example, 人 rén “human”, 花 huā “flower”, 书 shū “book”, etc., are all monosyllabic morphemes. In some cases, mostly loanwords, one morpheme can be represented by multiple syllables/characters. For example, words like 咖啡 kāfēi “coffee” and 加利福尼亚 jiālìfúníyà “California”, have only one morpheme, but are represented by two and five syllables/characters, respectively.

Morphemes can be free or bound, depending on their propensity to combine with other morphemes (Norman, 1988, p. 154). Free morphemes are the ones that can stand alone, such as 人 rén “human”, whereas a bound morpheme must be combined with other free or bound morphemes. For instance, 母 mǔ “female, mother” can only appear in words such as 父母 fùmǔ father-mother “parent”, 母鸡 mǔjī female-chicken “hen”. A morpheme that carries the core lexical meaning is called a root, and an affix is the non-root constituent of a word (Anderson, 2006; Carstairs-McCarthy, 2006). All free morphemes can be the root of a word; some bound morphemes can also serve as the root. For instance, the above example 父母 fùmǔ “parent” is composed of two bound roots, and 母鸡 mǔjī female-chicken “hen” is composed of a bound root (母) and a free root (鸡). The notion of a bound root also exists in English. Morphemes such as resist, consist, subsist all contain the bound root -sist (Sun, 2006, p 46).

When morphemes are combined to form morphologically complex words, the positions for free morphemes and some bound morphemes are typically not restricted, but a small number of bound morphemes which are affixes are position-restricted. For instance, the bound morpheme 非 fēi “not” is a prefix and can only be placed in front of another morpheme, such as 非人 fēi rén “inhuman”. In what follows, I briefly discuss how Chinese words are formed.

Word

The above distinctions regarding different types of morphemes in Chinese are very relevant in dissecting Chinese words. However, defining what a word is, is a much-debated issue among linguists in almost every language, but particularly so in Chinese (see, for example, Chao, 1968, pp. 136–193; Duanmu, 2007; Packard, 2000). It is not the intention of this chapter to provide a summary of the theoretical contentions on this matter; therefore, a traditional definition is adopted here, which serves as the basis for our discussion about word structure below. A word, according to Chinese linguist Wang Li (Wang, 1953, p. 3), is the “smallest independently useable part of language”.

The most prevalent type of word in Chinese is compound words, formed by conjoining two, sometimes three, morphemes neither of which is an affix (Norman, 1988, p. 156). For instance, 关心 guānxīn, close-heart “to concern”, is a compound word composed of two morphemes; 指南针 zhǐnán zhēn point-south-needle “compass” has three morphemes.

There is a small amount of inflection-like and derivation-like affixes in Chinese (Sun, 2006). For instance, 们 men is an inflection-like plural marker that can be attached to human nouns and pronouns: 我 wǒ “I, me”, 我们 wǒmen I/me-PL “we, us”: 化 huà is a suffix denoting change, which is similar to the English suffix -ize: 美国化 měiguó huà “to Americanize”. Sun’s (2006) description listed four inflection-like affixes and 15 derivation-like affixes in Chinese.

An additional process for word formation is reduplication. It can be used to form kinship terms, such as 妈妈 māma “mother”, and can be used for other grammatical functions; the nuances vary depending on the part of speech. A duplicated measure word conveys the meaning of “each and every”, such as 本 běn “volume”, 本本 běnběn “every volume”; depending on the verb, a duplicated verb indicates the sense of “tentative”, such as 坐 zuò “to sit” vs. 坐坐 “to sit for a short amount of time”; 走 zǒu “to walk; to leave” vs. 走走 “to stroll”.

In summary, morphemes in Chinese correspond to syllables and are represented in writing by characters. Morphemes, syllables, and characters do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence. Morphemes can be free or bound. The most productive word formation process in Chinese is compounding, although derivational and inflectional words do exist. Partly due to the fact that there is no clear boundary between morphology and syntax in Modern Chinese, analyzing and classifying Chinese words is a very complex study (Norman, 1988, p. 156). Therefore, it is important to note that Chinese words can be placed in a continuum representing the ones that are most lexical, composed of free morphemes, and at the other end most grammatical, composed of bound morphemes (Sun, 2006, p. 73). The discussion of Chinese morphemes and word formation rules, as I will illustrate more in detail in later chapters, are highly necessary, and of significant value for Chinese immersion teachers and students especially as they begin to comprehend complex texts in their content-based classes.

The Chinese Orthography

Structural Features of Chinese Characters

The basic unit of the Chinese writing system is a character, which is composed of strokes. A character can contain as few as one stroke (such as 一 yī “one”) to as many as 64 strokes ( zhé “to nag”). Different numbers of basic stroke patterns have been suggested, varying from 8 to 30 (Taylor & Taylor, 2014, p. 51). Stokes are strictly building blocks of Chinese characters and do not encode any phonetic or semantic values. Chinese children are taught to write characters by following a set of prescribed rules (Taylor & Taylor, 2014, p. 51). The main rules are: write from top to bottom, and write from left to write, write a horizontal stroke before a vertical stroke, and so on. These rules are believed to be important for easing the difficulty of writing and for forming good writing habits, and the stroke order “helps a right-handed writer to produce a legible and aesthetically pleasing – balanced, symmetrical, and graceful – shape smoothly, swiftly, and without smudging his or her sleeve in ink” (Taylor & Taylor, 2014, p. 51). Though it is obvious stroke orders were emphasized in literacy learning in ancient China for practical reasons, they are still emphasized and practiced in modern times through Chinese children’s textbooks and homework practices (e.g., Jiang, 2017). In fact, empirical evidence based on native Chinese children suggests that in Chinese, characters reading is dependent on writing, and that writing Chinese characters promotes the formation of long-term motor memory of Chinese characters by virtue of motor programming, which facilitates the consolidation process of lexical representation in the cognitive system (Tan, Spinks, Eden, Perfetti, & Siok, 2005).

Structurally speaking, there are two types of characters, single-unit and compound characters. A single-unit character is one that cannot be further divided into subunits, whereas a compound character has two or more subunits. To illustrate, 木 mù “tree” is a single-unit character that has only one composed of four strokes, whereas 林 lín “forest” is a compound character containing two subunits 3 (木), whereas 楼 lóu “building”, is a compound character composed of three subunits (木 on the left, and 米 and 女 on the top right and bottom right, respectively). According to a corpus analysis of 4868 characters in the Corpus System for Research on Modern Chinese, most characters are composed of three subunits (38.35%), two subunits (24.55%), and four subunits (21.98%) (Xing, 2005, p. 3).

Though only about 4% or less of characters are single-unit (Dictionary of Chinese Character Information, 1988), many of which are pictographs (象形字, xiàngxíng zì) in origin. These pictographs lost their iconicity long ago and their meanings cannot be determined by looking at their shapes. For example, 木 mù “tree” is a pictograph, which, to a pair of untrained eyes, may only see the resemblance after being told so. Though few in number, single-unit characters are highly useful—they can serve as building blocks for compound characters directly, or with some graphic modification. The 木 - 林 pair above is one example. In fact, in the aforementioned corpus analysis, Xing (2005, p. 3) identified 219 single-unit characters, which is only 4.5% of the corpus of 4868 characters; but they are being used the most frequently, averaging 1831.71 times in the corpus; this number is 382 times the average rate. In other words, single-unit characters are few when considered as types, but many when considered as tokens (Handel, 2012, p. 8).

Twelve basic spatial structures are used in forming compound characters; though 96% of compound characters are structured left-right and top-bottom (Dictionary of Chinese Character Information, 1988). For instance, 柏 (bǎi “cypress”) has a left-right structure, with 木 on the left and 白 on the right, and 杰 (jié “excellent”), is of a top-bottom structure, with 木 on the top, and 灬 in the bottom.

Functional Features of Chinese Characters

The majority of compound characters, or 81–84%, 4 are the so-called “semantic-phonetic compounds” (形声字 xíngshēng zì “form-sound-character”, Li & Kang, 1993; Zhou, 1978). As the name suggests, such characters encode both semantic and phonetic information. The semantic component, commonly referred to as the semantic radical, 5 and typically positioned on the left-hand side, provides clues to the meanings of the entire character. The phonetic component, or phonetic radical, usually on the right-hand side, offers clues to the pronunciation of the character. Take 柏 bǎi “cypress” as an example. The component on the left, a single-unit character 木, serves as the semantic radical, providing the semantic category for the whole character (cypress is a kind of tree), and the component on the right, another single unit character 白 bái “white”, reveals part of the pronunciation of the whole character (bǎi) to a certain degree (in this case, the only difference between the phonetic radical and the whole character is the tone). There are about 200 semantic radicals and about 800 phonetic radicals in Chinese (Hoosain, 1991; Norman, 1988).

The relationship between a semantic radical and its host character may not be as salient or readily perceivable (Lü, Koda, Zhang, & Zhang, 2015). For example, the semantic radical for the character 贵 guì “expensive” is 贝 bèi “a cowrie shell”. Located in the bottom, this semantic radical is also a single-unit character. The semantic connection here is that shells used to be a form of currency, therefore having to do with being valuable. An unsuspecting learner may not realize this connection until someone points it out explicitly.

The meanings of phonetic radicals do not have to do with the meanings of the characters; they are used purely for their phonetic values. However, the cueing validity of phonetic radicals is not high—about 30% on average (Zhou, 1978). For example, while some phonetic radicals can give a 100% accurate cue to the pronunciation of its host characters, such as 青 qīng “green” and 清 qīng “clear”, others may be completely unidentifiable without knowledge of historical sound change, such as 去 qù “to go” and 法 fǎ “method, principle, law”.

Sound Annotating Systems

Currently, there are two main sound annotating systems used as aids for learning characters. One of them is Hanyu Pinyin, typically taught and used along with simplified characters in areas such as Mainland China and Singapore; the other is known as Zhuyin fuhao, BoPoMoFo, or Mandarin Phonics, typically taught and used in Taiwan, 6 where traditional characters are used.

Hanyu Pinyin

Hanyu Pinyin (or Pinyin) is the official Romanization system for Standard Chinese promulgated by the Chinese government in 1958 (Zhou, 1958). Pinyin literally means “spell the sound” and was designed as an aid for character learning and for promoting 普通话 pǔtōng huà, the common speech of Mainland China (E. Zhou, 1958). The creation of the Pinyin alphabet has much to do with the Chinese language reform, and in particular, writing reform, in the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) since the 1950s. The complexity of the role of Pinyin in the history of language and writing reform is beyond the scope of the current chapter; interested readers can refer to resources such as Chapter 15 of DeFrancis’ (1984) book, and in particular, pages 262–284. In the following section, I briefly describe the linguistic features of this alphabetic system.

The Pinyin system employs all 26 letters from the English alphabet except for “v” but with an additional “ü”. The system consists of 21 initials (声母 shēngmǔ), 35 finals (韵母 yùnmǔ), and four lexical tones (声调 shēngdiào), according to the Official Pinyin Scheme (Department of Language Information Management, 1958). Reflecting the features of the Chinese language system delineated above, most Pinyin syllables begin with an optional initial consonant, followed by an obligatory final and a tone mark. While finals are possible combinations of a medial, which refers to a semivowel before the vowel, a nucleus vowel, and a coda, which is a final vowel or consonant. The four diacritics (¯´ˇ`) are placed above the nucleus of the syllable in finals representing the four lexical tones: first (high-level), second (rising), third (falling-rising), and fourth (falling), respectively. The neutral tone is not marked. To illustrate, the Pinyin syllable jiāng begins with the initial Pinyin letter j, representing the consonant /tɕ/; the letter i represents the medial; and the final vowel is represented by the letter cluster ang, which is read /aŋ/. The first tone is placed on the nucleus /a/. From the standpoint of letter-sound correspondence, Pinyin is a very shallow orthography and is highly consistent in letter-sound correspondence (McBride-Chang et al., 2012).

Zhuyin Fuhao

Zhuyin fuhao, the predominant sound annotating system taught in elementary schools in Taiwan, traces back to the National Language Movement since the 1910s. Some of the central issues back then included what kind of Chinese regional speech should be adopted as the national language, and what type of phonetic schemes should be used to represent this national language. The first version of Zhuyin fuhao was created in 1913, and it was later gradually refined (DeFrancis, 1984). The symbols in this system were created using simplified, ancient forms of Chinese characters. For example, the first symbol in the Zhuyin system is , representing the consonant [p], and is derived from the ancient form and current character (the pronunciation for this character is bāo if annotated with Pinyin, or [pau55] using the International Phonetic Alphabet). Therefore, using Zhuyin fuhao to annotate Chinese sounds is almost like using characters to spell (Ministry of Education of the R.O.C., 2000).

The current system includes 21 symbols for initial consonants, 13 symbols for ryhmes, and three for medials. Tones are also marked. The same Pinyin syllable jiāng illustrated above is spelled . represents the consonant /tɕ/, represents the medial /i/, and represents the final /aŋ/. The first tone is by default not marked, but the second, third, and fourth tones are marked with the same diacritic as those used in Pinyin (´ ˇ and `), noted at the upper-right corner of the last Zhuyin symbol of a syllable; the neutral tone is marked with a dot. For example, the syllable jiǎng is written as ˇ in this system.

Pinyin and Zhuyin fuhao are taught when children first enter elementary schools as part of the national curricula in Mainland China and Taiwan, respectively (Ministry of Education of the P.R.C., 2011; Ministry of Education of the R.O.C., 2000; Zhang & McBride Chang, 2011). For native speaking children, learning a sound annotating system serves as a convenient tool for them to connect their existing oral language to printed symbols; it can also assist them in exploring a greater breadth of reading materials containing unfamiliar or unlearned characters (Lü, 2016). Li, Jiang, Shu, Hong, and Anderson (2016) further added that Pinyin allows children to express themselves more freely using words that they may not have learned how to write, and the same argument can be made for children learning Zhuyin. However, from the example above, it is also evident that Zhuyin is based on the onset-rime division of syllables while Pinyin spelling is specified at the phoneme level. Take the earlier vs. jiāng contrast as an example. In Zhuyin, the single symbol represents the final ang, in this case, the vowel and coda are represented as a holistic chunk; while in Pinyin, the final is written out with three letters. In the section below, the implication of learning a sound annotating system on learning to read will be further discussed.

Summary

Characters are the basic unit of writing. A small percentage of characters are single-unit characters, which can be used as building blocks for compound characters. The majority of characters are compound characters, composed of one or more subunits, and most compound characters are formed with functionally distinct components: semantic radical on the left, and phonetic radical on the right; the semantic salience and phonetic validity of the radicals vary greatly.

Implications for Learning to Read Chinese

The Importance of Oral Language

It has been suggested that for beginning readers, the major challenge they confront is to access the mental lexicon for known words that they have never seen before in print (e.g., Beck & Juel, 1995; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Reitsma, 1984). Therefore, oral language skill, a multifaceted competence, is a critical foundation for reading acquisition. As suggested in previous chapters, what children learn to read is a writing system that encodes the spoken language. Therefore, in learning to read Chinese, children are essentially learning the associations between specific character forms and their corresponding syllable morphemes (Perfetti & Dunlap, 2008).

Among the basic language skills that underlie oral language skill, receptive oral vocabulary knowledge is seen as one of the most fundamental competences that promote word reading and decoding skills development. Because a word is the smallest free form in a language, it is therefore the component which contains the spoken units that are mapped onto the written units in learning to read. In actuality, in the literature, receptive oral vocabulary knowledge has been found to be consistently predicting a significant amount of variance within decoding in learning to read English (e.g., Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2004) as well as Chinese (Cheng, Wu, Liu, & Li, 2018). As suggested in Chapter 3, expressive oral vocabulary knowledge is another critical aspect of oral language skill, but its role has been less well explored in literacy research involving Chinese children or Chinese learners (e.g., Lü, 2016).

Orthographic Processing Skill

Orthographic processing skill is regarded as one of the emergent literacy skills which contributes to learning to read in both alphabetic languages (e.g., Conrad, Harris, & Williams, 2013; Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000) and nonalphabetic languages (e.g., Qian, Song, Zhao, & Bi, 2015). Orthographic processing skill is typically regarded as consisting of both word specific and general orthographic knowledge (Hagiliassis, Pratt, & Johnston, 2006). Word specific orthographic knowledge refers to knowledge of the spelling of specific words and units within words (Conrad et al., 2013); general orthographic knowledge is an awareness of the general attributes of a writing system, including sequential dependencies (such as ch is a legally allowed letter combination in English but cf is not), structural redundancies (the letter combination ‘ast’ occurs in many different words), and letter position frequencies (Vellutino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1994). In Chinese, it has been defined from various aspects with different terminologies such as distinguishing legal from illegal orthographic patterns in characters, and sensitivities to the positional and functional characteristics of units of writing (phonetic and semantic radicals) (e.g., Chen & Pasquarella, 2017; McBride, 2016, pp. 92–96).

Chinese L1 children develop initial orthographic processing skill before formal literacy instruction commences. For example, three-year-old children are reported to be able to distinguish characters from alphabetic scripts and drawings and by age five, they start to be able to recognize radicals from other printed objects but do not possess knowledge of radical combination rules (Ho, Yau, & Au, 2003; Luo, Chen, Deacon, & Li, 2011; Qian et al., 2015). Children as young as five have developed the concept that most characters are composed of two components (Ho et al., 2003); five- and six-year-old children are reported to be able to distinguish real characters from pseudo-characters (which do not violate positional constraint), noncharacters (which violate positional constraints), and other visual symbols (Chan & Nunes, 1998; Tong, Mcbride-Chang, Shu, & Wong, 2009).

However, children’s insight into the functionality of Chinese orthographic units is developed later and requires much more print-processing experiences, which intensify with schooling. For example, Shu, Anderson, and Wu (2000) examined Chinese children’s insights into the structure and function of phonetic radicals, the component of Chinese characters that gives a clue to pronunciation, and found that children as young as second graders were able to represent the pronunciation of regular characters, and such awareness continued to develop across the elementary school years; sixth graders made much less phonetic-related errors than fourth graders, who also outperformed second graders. The awareness is also affected by phonetic regularity and character familiarity. In another study, Shu and Anderson (1997) demonstrated that third (about 9-year-old) and fifth (about 11-year-old) graders developed awareness to semantic radicals when unfamiliar characters were involved, but first graders struggled with this task; children’s sensitivity to the relationship between a radical and its host character was also affected by radical familiarity and conceptual difficulty of the words. Chan and Nunes’ (1998) findings are similar to Shu and her colleagues’ (1997, 2000) studies and reported that though the ability to use semantic radical to represent meaning emerged as early as age six, the ability to systematically make use of phonetic radical for pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds but not with younger learners.

Orthographic processing skill is also a good predictor of Chinese character and word reading (Ho, Wong, & Chan, 1999; Tong et al., 2009; Yeung et al., 2011). For example, Yeung et al. (2011) found that orthographic skill was one of the two unique predictors of Chinese word reading and spelling for first grade students (about 7-year-old) in Hong Kong. In a training study, Ho et al. (1999) showed that third graders, as well as first graders, can be trained to make phonological and semantic analogies, provided by the phonetic and semantic radical, respectively, in reading unfamiliar Chinese characters.

In conclusion, orthographic processing skill is a multifaceted construct and is consisted of different yet interrelated aspects (Chen & Pasquarella, 2017). Facets of orthographic processing skill develop early, however, those require more refined insights into the functionality of Chinese orthographic units develop later, necessitating substantial print processing experience. Orthographic processing skill is also an important predictor of later character reading skills. The studies conducted with Chinese L1 children show that learning to read in Chinese is not accomplished simply by rote memorization of thousands of characters; rather, children do develop an analytical understanding of the underlying rules of written Chinese, which assists them further in the process of reading acquisition.

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness refers to children’s knowledge of and sensitivity to the internal sound structure of spoken words (e.g., Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001; Stahl & Murray, 1994). In learning to read alphabetic languages, phonological awareness enables children to segment spoken words into sequences of phonemes and phonemic clusters, which are then mapped onto the basic writing elements, letters, and letter clusters. This phonological recoding process allows children to recode words that they have heard but not seen before. In learning to read alphabetic languages, the comprehensive body of both correlational and training studies has established that phonological awareness is a critical precursor, correlate, and predictor of reading achievement (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland 1990; Stanovich, 1992).

In Chinese, phonological awareness can be assessed from different levels reflecting the Chinese phonological structure: syllable awareness, onset and rime awareness, phoneme awareness, and tone awareness. Syllable awareness refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate language and the unit of syllable, which represents the simplest phonological awareness level (McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004; Shu, Peng, & McBride-Chang, 2008); it is also very salient in Chinese, as one syllable typically represents one morpheme, as discussed above. By the same token, onset and rime awareness can be defined as the ability to perceive and manipulate onsets and rimes. In Chinese, onsets are typically phonemes, therefore, onset awareness measures awareness to initial phonemes. Rimes, such as ai, ang, are larger than phonemes and are taught as a holistic unit without further segmentation (Zhang & McBride-Chang, 2011). Tone awareness is the ability to perceive the difference in syllables that are only different in their lexical tone, such as lái versus lài.

Research to date has documented that the development of different levels of phonological awareness in Chinese is subject to the influences of age and methods of literacy instruction. Specifically, Chinese children become sensitized to larger phonological unit before smaller ones. Shu et al. (2008) reported that Chinese-speaking children in Beijing developed strong syllable awareness as early as age 4, but their rime awareness became solidified in the first year in elementary school (age 6); tone awareness followed a similar pattern. In comparison, the performance on phoneme onset awareness was not consistently at chance level and only steadily improved to 70% correct in their first year in elementary school.

Research on learning to read Chinese also consistently found that methods of literacy instruction play a role in the formation of phonological awareness in Chinese. For example, Xu and Ren (2004) studied the relationship between phonological awareness and Pinyin skills of grades 1, 3, and 5 children in Beijing and found that for children at each grade level, those with higher Pinyin skills outperformed the group with lower Pinyin skills on all phonological awareness tasks, and in regression analysis, Pinyin scores explained 46% of the variances in Chinese phonological awareness. Other studies contrasted age-comparable children with or without Pinyin learning experience on the level of their phonological awareness and found that the experience of learning Pinyin enhanced their phonological awareness (e.g., Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Leong, Cheng, & Tan, 2005; McBride-Chang et al., 2004). For example, McBride-Chang et al. (2004) compared native Chinese children from Mainland China and Hong Kong, and native English-speaking children from Canada, on their syllable and phoneme onset awareness; all children in this study were in kindergarten or grade 1. The researchers found that between the two native Chinese-speaking groups, those in Mainland China demonstrated higher levels of syllable and phoneme awareness as compared to children in Hong Kong. The authors suggested that Pinyin training, which children in Mainland China received but not those in Hong Kong, might have promoted the former group’s sensitivity to phonemes. Lin et al. (2010) argued that the practice of Pinyin strengthened children’s phonological awareness and that Pinyin served as a self-teaching tool, the mastery of which can greatly increase children’s chances of learning new Chinese characters without explicit instruction. The impact of different sound annotating systems on children’s phonological awareness remains a topic to be further explored. Zhang and McBride-Chang (2011) pointed out that future studies could compare whether learning the pinyin and Zhuyin systems sensitizes children differently to phoneme units since the two systems represent sounds (especially finals) in a different way.

Phonological awareness is also found to be closely related to character learning in Chinese in numerous studies among children in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (e.g., Ho & Bryant, 1997a, b; Hu & Catts, 1998; Huang & Hanley, 1997; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002.). For example, Ho and Bryant (1997a, b) showed that phonological skills in Chinese significantly predicted children’s later reading performance. In particular, rime awareness is critical in helping children to read semantic-phonetic compound characters, in that rime awareness contributes to the acquisition of the knowledge of orthography-phonology correspondence between sounds of characters. So and Siegel (1997) found that phonological processing skills, measured by rhyme discrimination and tone discrimination tasks, were highly correlated with Chinese word recognition and that poor readers and good readers showed individual differences on rhyme and tone discrimination tasks. Conversely, phonological processing deficit is linked to reading difficulty. Chan and Siegel (2001) found that poor readers had more difficulty in tone processing which was a possible indication of phonological deficit.

In sum, despite the nonalphabetic nature of the Chinese orthography, research so far has shown convincing evidence that phonological awareness plays an important role in learning to read Chinese. However, reading is more than just converting orthographic units into their phonological forms; in order for comprehension to occur, semantic information has to be identified for the converted phonological forms. In Chinese, as previously described, syllables map onto morphemes which, in print, are represented by characters. Therefore, learning to read in Chinese requires learning grapheme-morpheme mapping, and because of this, morphological awareness has been proposed to be mostly related to literacy in Chinese (Nagy & Anderson, 1999; Packard et al., 2006).

Morphological Awareness

Morphological awareness can be defined as “children’s conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure” (Carlisle, 1995, p. 194). Based on previous studies, Kuo and Anderson (2006) summarized three reasons for why this facet of metalinguistic awareness is important in learning to read: (1) morphemes carry phonological, semantic, and syntactic properties, therefore, sensitivity to how morphemes function may provide a “more general index of metalinguistic capability” than phonological or syntactic awareness considered alone (Carlisle, 1995, p. 192); (2) psycholinguistic studies have consistently shown that adult readers make use of morphological information in processing complex words which suggest that morphological knowledge serves as a framework for efficient word storage; and (3) morphological awareness provides readers with additional insight into the specific ways of how a writing system functions. One example given in Chinese is the existence of a large amount morphemes pronounced with the same syllable but are represented with different orthographic forms (e.g., see the section on Chinese phonology in this chapter). Kuo and Anderson (2006) argued that more developed morphological awareness would lead to more accuracy and fluency in reading morphologically complex words.

Studies on morphological awareness in reading acquisition in Chinese are rapidly growing. Results yielded so far from available studies suggest that children’s morphological awareness, in particular, compound awareness, develops as early as first grade (Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu, & Shu, 2009), and aspects of morphological awareness steadily improve as children progress from second to sixth grade (Ku & Anderson, 2003); children’s sensitivity to homophones emerges in preschool (ages 3–5) but it continues to develop through third grade (Hao, Chen, Dronjic, Shu, & Anderson, 2013). Studies also show that facets of children’s morphological awareness in Chinese develop as disparate rates as a function of part of speech. For instance, Liu and McBride-Chang (2010) assessed third grade children’s morphological awareness using a lexical compounding task, which required children to produce novel morphologically complex compound words with prompts. For example, children in the study would hear prompts such as 我们把味道酸酸的雾气叫做什么? ‘What do we call mist that smells sour?’ The model answer was 酸雾 ‘sour mist’ (a subordinate, adjective + noun compound). The researchers found that subordinate and coordinative structures were significantly easier than subject-predict and verb-object structures; novel compounds containing verb morphemes were found to be more difficult to manipulate than those which did not.

Morphological awareness in Chinese has also been found to have a strong link to reading vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension for children across elementary school years. For example, Chen et al. (2009) found that compound awareness explained unique variance in children’s expressive oral vocabulary and character reading, and the contribution to vocabulary from compound awareness was much larger than that made by phonological awareness. Zhang (2014) found that second graders’ derivational awareness and compound awareness significantly predicted the children’s reading vocabulary.

It is important to point out that the studies above measured morphological awareness in Chinese strictly defined as children’s sensitivity to the morphological structure of spoken words; however, when higher literacy skills, such as reading comprehension, are involved, access to meaning (through orthographic cues) becomes compulsory, necessitating the ability to coordinate orthographic, phonological, and semantic information during reading. Such an ability is defined as graphomorphological awareness (Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Nagy, Kuo-Kealoha, Xinchun, Li, Anderson, & Xi, 2002). Recent studies have confirmed this contention. For example, in an 8-year longitudinal study, Pan et al. (2016) demonstrated that preliterate morphological awareness did not predict late literacy skills, but postliterate morphological awareness (similar to graphomorphological awareness) significantly predicted children’s character-level skills, reading fluency, as well as reading comprehension. The increasing importance of graphomorphological awareness was explained by the fact that higher‐level meaning‐based processing, such as text reading and comprehension, involve more morpho-semantic information which can be obtained from orthography in Chinese (Pan et al., 2016). Sun, Hu, and Curdt-Christiansen (2018) also identified that for bilingual children in Singapore (mean age = 9.1), graphomorphological awareness and syntactic awareness explained more variance than phonological awareness in their writing competence, a critically understudied area in Chinese literacy development, and that syntactic awareness was the only predictor of writing competence for age-matched monolingual children in mainland China.

To summarize, to date, studies have pinpointed the importance of morphological awareness in learning to read Chinese characters and reading vocabulary development and highlighted the importance of graphomorphological awareness in higher level reading skills including reading comprehension.

Conclusion

Learning to read entails learning the specific ways of how units of the language system map onto the writing system (Perfetti, 2003); therefore, specific orthographic, phonological, and morphological features of a language invariably lead to differences in the process of learning to read. As I have illustrated above, the Chinese language and orthography operate differently from the English language and orthography in terms of mapping details; however, there is also certain degree of commonality in how the two languages function. A large amount of evidences on L1 Chinese children learning to read show that, similar to learning to read English, orthographic, phonological, and morphological awareness play critical roles in learning to read Chinese, but the instantiations are very much attuned to the specific features of the Chinese language and orthographic system. With this in mind, I turn to the next chapter which examines the properties of print materials students were explicitly taught within the focal OWI program. These materials formed the basis for students in the focal program to develop their character knowledge in Chinese, like decoding skills in English, such knowledge creates a threshold for utilizing their comprehension skills in their reading acquisition process (Hoover & Gough, 1990); therefore, a clear understanding of the features of the print materials children are explicitly taught with will greatly help us understand how external variables shape such a process.

Notes

  1. 1.

    ACTFL and CAEP are acronyms for American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, respectively.

  2. 2.

    Suprasegmental is a term used in phonetics to refer to features superimposed on syllables. Principal suprasegmental features include stress, length, tone, and intonation (Ladefoged & Johnson, 2011, p. 23).

  3. 3.

    These structural units, some are free-standing, and some are not, are recurring integral stroke patterns that are functionally orthographic units in the recognition of Chinese characters, comparable to letters in alphabetic word recognition (Chen, Allport, & Marshall, 1996). In Chinese, especially in Chinese information processing literature, they are termed as 部件 bùjiàn, roughly translated as ‘component’ in English.

  4. 4.

    The rest of the characters that are neither pictographs nor semantic-phonetic compounds are categorized as “ideographs”; (指事字, zhǐshì zì), and “semantic compounds” (会意字 huìyì zì). Characters of these types are few in number (Handel, 2012).

  5. 5.

    It is worth pointing out that the term radical is mostly used in the field of reading acquisition and psycholinguistics, but there is also a certain degree of inconsistency and dissatisfaction toward this term (Chen et al., 1996, pp. 1027–1028). In Chinese linguistics, semantic radical is typically referred to as semantic component, signific or determinative, and phonetic radical is typically called phonetic component or phonophoric. See more discussion in Handel (2012, p. 7).

  6. 6.

    Although the Taiwanese government announced a plan to make Hanyu Pinyin the standard system of Romanization nationwide starting on Jan 1, 2009, as a way to make Taiwan more internationally competitive and friendly to foreigners, Hanyu Pinyin has been only slowly adopted by its counties (Shih, 2008).