The Roles of Different Components of Phonological Awareness in English Reading among Mandarin-speaking Children

This study examined the roles of different components of phonological awareness and the moderating effect of reading levels in learning to read in English among Mandarin-speaking children in primary school.Seventy-four third and fifth graders in Study 1 finished detection and deletion tasks of phonological awareness in both Chinese and English,an English word identification task and an English work attack task.Eighty-three poor English readers and 73 average readers in Study 2 completed a deletion task of English phonological awareness as well as English word reading tasks.Results indicated that English onset-rime awareness accounted for significant part of variances of English reading even after controlling for age,nonverbal IQ and other components of phonological awareness.While Chinese onset-rime awareness accounted for unique variances for word recognition and tone awareness did for nonword decoding,their effects on English reading were mediated by English onset-rime awareness.Moreover,children's reading levels moderated the relation between phonological awareness and English reading.English onset-rime awareness was the only significant predictor for nonimpaired readers,whereas English syllable awareness was the only significant predictor for poor readers.This study revealed the importance of onset-rime and syllable awareness in learning to read English among Mandarin-speaking children,suggesting that native language experience may have significant effects on learning to read a second language.