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Orthographic consistency and individual learner differences in second language literacy acquisition

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Abstract

This study investigated whether orthographic consistency and individual learner differences including working memory (WM), first language (L1) background, and second language (L2) proficiency affect Chinese L2 learners’ literacy acquisition. Seventy American college students in beginning or intermediate Chinese classes participated in a character learning-and-reading experiment, and completed WM tasks and an L2 proficiency test. In the learning phase of the experiment, participants were asked to master 18 unfamiliar Chinese characters of three levels of consistency—consistent, semi-consistent, and inconsistent. Then in the transfer test of the experiment, participants read 60 novel, artificial characters analogous to the learned characters. Significant consistency effects for learning and reading new characters were found, with no effects of WM and L1. In particular, an interaction effect between consistency and L2 proficiency found in the learning phase indicated that participants with higher L2 proficiency learned the fully consistent characters better and faster than those with lower proficiency. These results suggest that L2 proficiency facilitates awareness of consistency, enabling learners to learn novel characters faster and more accurately. The findings of this study are compared with the character acquisition of beginning L1 Chinese readers and with L2 learners’ acquisition of other types of characters.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, a “second language (L2)” is used as an umbrella term to refer to any language acquired after one’s native language, including both a second language and a foreign language, regardless of the learning context.

  2. In this paper, the pronunciation of a character is in italics with a number indicating the tone.

  3. In this study, learning refers to the learning of new characters in a learning phase, while reading is defined as the transfer from learned knowledge in a transfer test. Latency refers to naming latency, i.e., the time it takes for a participant to pronounce the target character aloud. Details are described in the procedure and materials sections below.

  4. The L1 speakers of Chinese dialects were all Chinese heritage learners who had not received any formal instruction in Mandarin Chinese or Chinese characters before taking Chinese courses at the university.

  5. LME models perform regression analysis on categorical or continuous outcomes, accounting for random subject and item effects in a single analysis (Cunnings, 2012, for a review). Recent studies have concluded that analysis of variance is inappropriate to analyze dichotomous data, such as that seen in our accuracy results (Dixon, 2008; Jaeger, 2008).

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Acknowledgments

The preparation of the manuscript was supported by research grants from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to Sun-A Kim (G-YN31) and from Dongguk University in 2015 to Jeong-Ah Shin. The experiment reported here is a portion of the first author’s doctoral dissertation. We thank anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Sun-A Kim

  2. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Jerome Packard, Kiel Christianson & Richard C. Anderson

  3. Division of English Language and Literature, Dongguk University, 30 Pildong-ro 1-gil Jung-gu, Seoul, 04620, Republic of Korea

    Jeong-Ah Shin

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  1. Sun-A Kim
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Correspondence to Jeong-Ah Shin.

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Kim, SA., Packard, J., Christianson, K. et al. Orthographic consistency and individual learner differences in second language literacy acquisition. Read Writ 29, 1409–1434 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9643-y

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