Development of word order and morphosyntactic skills in written composition in Chinese children.

Abstract

Purpose: The present study examined the development of syntactic skills and their contributions to written composition in Chinese among students at Grade 3, 4, and 5. Evidence has shown that syntactic skills are important predictors of reading comprehension and written composition in Chinese across elementary grades. Method: The participants were 383 Chinese students in Grade 3, 4 and 5 in Hong Kong. They were administered tasks assessing their reading comprehension, text writing, word order skills, connective usage skills, morphosyntactic skills, word dictation and working memory. Results: Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that syntactic skills (word order skills, connective usage skills, and morphosyntactic skills) accounted for 15% of the unique variance in Chinese written composition even after controlling for Raven’s scores, working memory, word dictation and reading comprehension. The interaction effect between grades (Grades 3 & 4 versus Grade 5) and word order skills, and the interaction effect between grades (Grades 3 & 4 versus Grade 5) and morphosyntactic skills were significant. Conclusions: There were two major findings. First, contrary to past findings in the literature, syntactic skills explained unique variance in written composition even after controlling for reading comprehension. This highlighted the unique role of syntactic skills in written composition. Second, the contribution of word order skills and morphosyntactic skills to written composition was stronger in Grade 5 than Grades 3 and 4. Syntactic skills play a more important role in learning to write in Chinese in upper elementary grades. These findings may help inform the development of effective writing instructions in Chinese.