Chinese children learning to read in a monolingual and bilingual context

Abstract

Various cognitive-linguistic skills are involved in reading across scripts. The present thesis is a systematic study that examined the precursors of Chinese early literacy development in monolingual Chinese children and the precursors of early literacy development in Chinese as a first language and Dutch as a second language among Chinese children in a bilingual context (the Netherlands). The findings expand our knowledge of how Chinese children learn to read in the early stage in Chinese monolingual and Chinese-Dutch bilingual contexts. Phonological awareness was found to be a universal predictor of word reading in kindergarten across the two groups. High stability was also shown for word reading from the last year of kindergarten to first grade for the two groups of children. However, the longitudinal predictive patterns of learning to read for monolingual vs. bilingual children were different. The present dissertation made it clear that the process of learning to read across languages has universal features but is also dependent on the linguistic and educational contexts of participants