The Role of Chinese Character Reading in Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Study from Kindergarten to Early School Years

Abstract

Characters are the basic orthographic unit of written Chinese. Chinese children start learning characters in their preschool years when they first begin to read. While character reading is a critical early literacy experience, little is known about its potential contributions to children’s long-term reading development. In this longitudinal study, a total of 200 Chinese kindergarten children were assessed using a range of language and literacy measures in three waves: kindergarten (Time 1 at age 6 years), first grade (Time 2 at age 7 years), and second or third grade (Time 3 at age 8 years). Our results revealed that character reading at Time 1 was significantly associated with reading comprehension at Time 3 via three pathways, including a unique direct pathway and two indirect pathways mediated by word reading and morphological awareness. The direct pathway was found to remain statistically significant even after controlling for the autoregressive effects of reading comprehension and the effects of other language and literacy skills. The present study highlights the unique and important role of character reading in early reading comprehension development. It also provides practical recommendations on how to incorporate character reading into early reading instruction in Chinese.

Keywords: Character reading, reading comprehension, morphological awareness, Chinese