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Syntactic awareness matters: uncovering reading comprehension difficulties in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children

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Abstract

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: (1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC), (2) 18 poor in English-only (PE), (3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB), (4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB), and (5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. By suggesting that weakness in syntactic awareness can serve as a universal indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1 Chinese and L2 English among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children, these findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntactic awareness in bilingual reading comprehension.

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Funding

The work described in this paper was supported by the General Research Fund (18609220) to Xiuhong Tong and partially supported by the General Research Fund (17673216 and 17609518), and Research Fellow Scheme (RFS 2021-7H05) from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, to Shelley Xiuli Tong. Qinli Deng is supported by the Postdoctoral Fellowship from Hong Kong Research Grants Council. We thank all research assistants for data collection. We are also especially grateful to parents and participants for their participation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Ting Kok, China

    Xiuhong Tong

  2. Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Room 804C, Meng Wah Complex, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China

    Qinli Deng & Shelley Xiuli Tong

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  1. Xiuhong Tong
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  2. Qinli Deng
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Correspondence to Shelley Xiuli Tong.

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This study was carried out in accordance with standards of the Human Research Ethics Committee of the corresponding author’s university. Written informed consent for publication of the participants’ details was obtained from the children and their parents prior to their participation.

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Tong, X., Deng, Q. & Tong, S.X. Syntactic awareness matters: uncovering reading comprehension difficulties in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Ann. of Dyslexia 72, 532–551 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-022-00268-y

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