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Reading and Writing

, Volume 31, Issue 7, pp 1499–1523 | Cite as

Metalinguistic contribution to writing competence: a study of monolingual children in China and bilingual children in Singapore

  • Baoqi Sun
  • Guangwei Hu
  • Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen
Article
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Abstract

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to the writing competence of primary three English–Chinese bilingual children in Singapore (n = 390) and monolingual Chinese-speaking children in Mainland China (n = 190). Hierarchical regression analyses found that the three components of metalinguistic awareness differed in their contributions to writing competence across the languages and between the two groups of children, with morphological awareness and syntactic awareness explaining markedly more variance than phonological awareness. Furthermore, SEM results revealed a robust cross-linguistic association between English and Chinese metalinguistic awareness in the bilingual children, which appeared to jointly undergird and support writing competence in both languages. Finally, home language use significantly predicted not only the bilingual children’s English metalinguistic awareness but also their writing performance in Chinese. These findings lend support to Cummins’s Common Underlying Proficiency and Developmental Interdependence Hypotheses, and underscore the importance of language context, formal instruction, and language features in children’s literacy development.

Keywords

Metalinguistic awareness Morphological awareness Phonological awareness Syntactic awareness Writing competence Biliteracy 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Part of the data drawn on in this study came from a research project supported by the Education Research Funding Programme (Grant no. OER35/09XLC), National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of NIE. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the participating schools, teachers and students.

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.National Institute of EducationNanyang Technological UniversitySingaporeSingapore
  2. 2.Department of EnglishThe Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHunghom, KowloonChina
  3. 3.Department of EducationUniversity of BathBathUK

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