An examination of 'The Simple View of Reading' in Chinese

Abstract

Purpose To examine the interrelationships among oral language skills (expressive vocabulary, word definition, oral narrative skills, and syntactic skills), word reading (word recognition and reading fluency) and reading comprehension (sentence comprehension and passage comprehension) in light of the simple view of reading in Chinese. Method The reading development of 369 Chinese children in Hong Kong was tracked in a 3-year longitudinal study from Grade 1 to Grade 3. They were administered measures of general reasoning ability, oral language skills, word reading, and reading comprehension. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data. Results Multiple regression analysis results showed that, among all oral language skills measures, only syntactic knowledge contributed significant unique variance to both sentence comprehension and passage comprehension. As for word reading measures, word recognition contributed significant unique variance to both sentence comprehension and passage comprehension while word reading fluency only significantly predicted passage reading comprehension. A model of the simple view of reading in Chinese was postulated. Conclusions Our findings suggested that oral language skills and word reading are important for reading comprehension in both Chinese and alphabetic languages. This contrasts with past research that shows marked differences in the cognitive-linguistic skills important for word reading development between Chinese and alphabetic languages. The exceptional importance of syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension development among Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong, whose spoken language differs from the written form in significant ways, was discussed in light of the impact of dialect variation on literacy acquisition.