Examining the simple view of reading in Chinese from a developmental perspective

Abstract

The simple view of reading (SVR) was adopted as a theoretical framework in the present study to explore the developmental patterns of different skills of decoding (accuracy and fluency) and linguistic comprehension (oral vocabulary, syntactic skills and listening comprehension) in predicting Chinese reading comprehension among 136 students in Primary One, Three and Five in Hong Kong. After controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence and verbal working memory, decoding and linguistic comprehension together accounted for 31.5% to 36.9% of variance in Chinese reading comprehension in the three grades, lending support to the universality of the SVR. However, while decoding was more important in junior grades as suggested in the SVR, linguistic comprehension was more predictive than decoding across grades. After decoding had been controlled for, the amount of unique variance explained by linguistic comprehension was 13.9% in Primary One, 19.1% in Primary Three and 16.3% in Primary Five. By examining the developmental patterns of the componential skills of decoding, it was revealed that decoding accuracy played a more critical role in reading comprehension than decoding fluency did across grades. For linguistic comprehension, syntactic skills and listening comprehension were more important in Primary One and Three while oral vocabulary made significant contribution in Primary Five.