Phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in learning to read English among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong

British Journal of Educational Psychology (2013), 83, 550–568

© 2012 The British Psychological Society

www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Phonological awareness and oral languageproficiency in learning to read English amongChinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong

Susanna S. Yeung1,2* and Carol K. K. Chan2

1Department of Psychological Studies, The Hong Kong Institution of Education,Hong Kong2Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Background. Learning to read is very challenging for Hong Kong children who learn

English as a second language (ESL), as they must acquire two very different writing

systems, beginning at the age of three. Few studies have examined the role of phonological

awareness at the subsyllabic levels, oral language proficiency, and L1 tone awareness in L2

English reading among Hong Kong ESL kindergarteners.

Aims. This study aims to investigate L1 and L2 phonological awareness and oral language

proficiency as predictors of English reading among children with Chinese as L1.

Sample. One hundred and sixty-one typically developing children with a mean age of

5.16 (SD=.35) selected from seven preschools in Hong Kong.

Method. Participants were assessed for English reading, English and Chinese phono-

logical awareness at different levels, English oral language skills, and letter naming ability.

Results. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both oral language proficiency

and phonological awareness measures significantly predicted L2 word reading, when

statistically controlled for age and general intelligence. Among various phonological

awareness units, L2 phonemic awareness was the best predictor of L2 word reading.

Cross-language transfer was shown with L1 phonological awareness at the tone level,

uniquely predicting L2 word reading.

Conclusions. The present findings show the important role of phonological awareness

at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) and oral language proficiency in the course of

L2 reading development in Chinese ESL learners. The significant contribution of L1 tone

awareness to L2 reading suggests that phonological sensitivity is a general competence

that ESL children need to acquire in early years. The findings have significant implications

for understanding L2 reading development and curriculum development.

The increase in the number of students learning English as a second language

(ESL) worldwide has contributed to a rapid growth in second language (L2) reading

*Correspondence should be addressed to Susanna S. S. Yeung, Department of Psychological Studies, The Hong Kong Institute ofEducation, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR (e-mail: [email protected]).

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8279.2012.02082.x

550

research; until recently, only limited L2 reading research had been conducted, particularly

among learners with non-alphabetic first languages (L1). Initial research findings in this

line of research have suggested that the developmental pattern for English reading among

ESL learners is similar to that of native English speakers (e.g., Lesaux & Siegel, 2003).Specifically, phonological awareness, the metalinguistic skills of perceiving, identifying,

and manipulating speech sounds within a word (Hatcher, Hulme & Ellis, 1994), has been

found to play a significant role in the English reading development of ESL learners (e.g.,

Gottardo, Yan, Siegel & Wade-Woolley, 2001). Similarly, some studies involving Chinese

ESL children with logographic L1 have reported the unique and significant role of

phonological awareness at the syllable level in English reading (e.g., McBride-Chang&Ho,

2005). However, little is known about the relative contribution of various forms of

phonological awareness, particularly the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) and thetone level (a unique phonological feature of Chinese spoken languages), to English word

reading in Chinese ESL learners. Also, these studies have not controlled for the effects of

oral language proficiency, which is another significant predictor of beginning reading

(Adams, 1990; Scarborough, 1998, 2001). The current study is designed to extend current

literature by evaluating the relative contribution of various levels of phonological

awareness in both L1 and L2 and oral language proficiency to beginning reading

development among young Chinese ESL students.

Phonological awareness and English reading in Chinese ESL learners

Phonological awareness has been conceptualized as developing across levels of different

phonological units (Stanovich, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). Phonological

awareness in childhood progresses from sensitivity at the syllable level, to sensitivity at

the onset-rime level and, finally, to sensitivity at the phoneme level (Anthony, Lonigan,

Driscoll, Phillips & Burgess, 2003). Both theoretically and practically, it is important to

identify which levels of phonological awareness are bi-directionally associated withbeginning reading development, meaning that the phonological awareness at a particular

unit is strongly associated with beginning reading and the acquisition of such level of

phonological awarenesswould further contribute to the development of reading skills. As

stipulated by the psycholinguistic grain-size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), the

importance of psycholinguistic units of phonological awareness is influenced by how

speech is represented in an orthography. For English, both larger grain-size units (syllable

and rime) and the finest grain-size unit (phoneme) may play a role in reading acquisition

because English is regarded as a deep orthography in alphabeticalwriting system inwhichwords are not totally regular. There is emerging evidence that phonological awareness at

both syllabic and subsyllabic levels significantly contributes to the development of English

reading among Chinese ESL learners, as it does in native English speakers (e.g., Gottardo

et al., 2001; Keung & Ho, 2009; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002).

Several studies involving young Hong Kong children have demonstrated the

importance of phonological awareness in early L2 reading development; McBride-Chang

and Kail (2002), for example, examine the role of phonological awareness at the syllable

level, speeded naming, visual processing and speed of processing in beginning Englishreading performance among kindergarten students in Hong Kong. Of these measures,

syllable awareness was found to be the strongest predictor of reading. A recent study by

Keung and Ho (2009) notes that phonological manipulations (at the rhyme and phoneme

levels) explain a significant amount of variance in the English word reading of Hong Kong

students in junior primary grades. Research evidence, while limited, supports the

Phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in learning to read English 551

significant contribution of different forms of phonological awareness in explaining early

L2 reading among young Hong Kong ESL children. However, to our knowledge, there is a

lack of research in examining the role of phonemic awareness in L2 word reading among

Chinese kindergarteners.As letter-sound is not explicitly taught in Hong Kong kindergartens, students tend to

have relatively weak phonemic awareness (McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong & Li,

2004); as such, it is very difficult to devise sensitive awareness measures at a fine-grain

level. In studies involving both English native-speaking and ESL students with other L1

languages, phonemic awareness has been shown to play a pivotal role in early English

reading development (Geva & Siegel, 2000; Liberman & Liberman, 1992; Lindsey, Manis

& Bailey, 2003). Given the difficulty in devising sensitive measures and the poor

phonological skills, very few past studies have used phonemic awareness measureswhen examining the English reading development of Chinese kindergarteners. This

study is interested in exploring whether rhyme and phonemic awareness, as compared

to syllable awareness, is significantly associated with English reading in young Hong

Kong Chinese ESL learners.

Cross-language transfer

There is a growing body of evidence that L1 phonological awareness is highly correlatedwith L2 phonological awareness and significantly predicts L2 reading performance among

children learning to read in two alphabetical orthographies (e.g., Chiappe & Siegel, 1999;

Cisero & Royer, 1995; Durgunoglu, Nagy &Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Geva & Siegel, 2000; Sun-

Alperin & Wang, 2011).

Cross-language transfer is also evident in ESL students with a non-alphabetic L1 (e.g.,

Chen, Xu, Nguyen, Hong & Wang, 2010; Chow, McBride-Chang & Burgess, 2005;

Gottardo et al., 2001; Tong & McBride-Chang, 2010). For instance, Chow et al. (2005)

report that phonological awareness in Chinese, as operationalized at the syllable level, is asignificant concurrent predictor of English reading abilities among young Hong Kong ESL

students, even when controlled for age, L1 vocabulary, and visual skills, and also predicts

subsequent English acquisition.

As Chinese is a tonal language, tone awareness is arguably the most important

phonological element in Chinese reading (Siok & Fletcher, 2001). In particular,

Cantonese, the language spoken by Hong Kong Chinese, contains a large number of

tonal distinctions. Tone awareness is a form of phonological awareness that is absent in

the English phonological system. On the one hand, the significant contribution of toneawareness to English reading among Chinese ESL children theoretically suggests that

some shared phonological sensitivity underpins reading acquisition in different orthog-

raphies. On the other hand, the non-significant role of tone awareness is interpreted as a

support to the view that specific requisite phonological skills are important for reading

acquisition. Many studies on L1 and L2 reading skills among Chinese children have

overlooked tone awareness as ameasure; those that have included it have reportedmixed

findings. McBride-Chang et al. (2008) report that tone awareness does not explain unique

variances in English reading amongHongKong kindergarten students after controlling forL1 phonological awareness at other levels. Tone awareness is, however, significantly

associated with English reading performance among older children (Wang, Perfetti & Liu,

2005; Wang, Yang & Cheng, 2009). The current study includes both tone awareness and

Chinese rhyme awareness and tests phonological sensitivity atwhich unit ismore strongly

related to English word reading. The results allow us to test the hypothesis of general

552 Susanna S. Yeung and Carol K. K. Chan

phonological sensitivity underpinning beginning reading development among children

learning two languages with large linguistic distance simultaneously.

The role of oral language skills in reading

More recently, oral language proficiency has played a more prominent role in reading

research, with some studies reporting that it affects early reading acquisition and the

development of metalinguistic skills such as phonological processing and orthographic

processing (Scarborough, 1998; Verhallen & Schoonen, 1993; Wang & Geva, 2003).

The contribution of oral language to L2 reading, as compared with the contribution of

phonological awareness, is unclear. Some studies have found L2 oral language skills to be

significantpredictorsofL2readingabilities (Bernhardt&Kamil,1995;Lindseyet al.,2003),whereas others have reported non-significant contributions, after controlling for phono-

logical awareness (Durgunogluet al., 1993;Geva,Yaghoub-Zadeh&Schuster, 2000).Most

related studieshave involvedESL learnerswithalphabetic L1swhoare immersed inEnglish

learningenvironmentsatschool.Theroleoforal languageproficiencyamongchildrenwith

limited L2 speech input has not been extensively studied.

When engaging in phonological decoding of printed words, one needs to map the

phonological code to the corresponding oral vocabulary; limited oral vocabulary may

hinder both students’ phonological development and reading abilities (Bialystok, 2007;Metsala & Walley, 1998). According to lexical restructuring hypothesis (Metsala, 1999;

Metsala &Walley, 1998), when children’s vocabulary expands rapidly and spoken words

become more and more similar phonetically (e.g., cat and car are different by a single

phoneme), theymust begin to represent thewordswithmore fine-grained and segmented

phonological representation. The degree to which the restructured segmental represen-

tation has taken place contributes to the development of phonological awareness and

subsequently influences the reading acquisition. Based on this model, vocabulary size is

related to one’s phonological awareness and, in turn, contributes to reading performance.However, the acquisition of literacy may influence the further development of

phonological awareness and thus may lead to re-organization of the segmental

representation or lexical categories. Based on their model, underdeveloped oral

proficiency in a given language may compromise students’ ability to learn to read that

language. Kindergarteners in Hong Kong usually have limited oral vocabulary when they

begin reading instruction in their first or second year of kindergarten education. It is

possible that their limited oral proficiency may hinder their development in both

phonological representation and reading performance. Studies involving young studentsfrom Hong Kong have not controlled for the effects of oral language proficiency when

examining the effects of phonological awareness on beginning L2 reading development.

Research questions

The current study attempts to extend previous literature by examining the contribution of

oral language proficiency and phonological awareness at varying linguistic units on L2

reading among young Chinese ESL children. In addition, this study investigates cross-language associations between L1 and L2 phonological awareness and L2 reading. It is

anticipated thatoral languageproficiencyandphonological awareness inbothL1andL2will

uniquelyassociatewithL2readingperformance.Weareparticularly interested in testing the

ideathatphonologicalawarenessatthesubsyllabiclevels(rimeandphoneme)issignificantly

associated with English reading and tone awareness is transferrable to L2 reading among


Chinese ESL children. The following research questions related to early L2 reading

development among Hong Kong Chinese ESL kindergartener students were investigated:

(1) Do phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) and orallanguage proficiency in L2 significantly account for L2 reading after controlling for

age, general intelligence and phonological awareness at the syllable level?

(2) Are phonological awareness skills at the rhyme and tone levels in L1 transferred to

L2 reading after controlling for age and general intelligence?

Method

Participants

One hundred and sixty-one students were recruited from K3 classes (final year of

preschool education) in seven Hong Kong preschools participated in the current study.

All the participating schools were typical local kindergartens in which Cantonese is the

medium of instruction and English is treated as a school subject. Students at these schools

received two to three 20- to 30-min English lessons per week, each with a native English

teacher. In addition, they practised English and Chinese writing for 20–30 min daily,instructed by their class teacher, andwere taught both oral andwritten English. No formal

and systematic phonic teaching was provided. All participating students in this study

spoke Cantonese at home. Their parents were mainly lower or lower middle class Hong

Kongpeoplewhodidnot speak English to their children at home. Studentswith signs of or

reported neurological or developmental disabilities were excluded from the sample.

There were 80 boys and 81 girls in the sample, all of whom were tested in the first

semester of their final year of kindergarten. The mean age of the students was 5.16 years

(range = 4.80–6.08; SD = .35).

Assessment measures

All measures were administered individually with instructions in Cantonese, which is the

participants’ spoken language, by trained experimenters. The English items were orally

presented in English. Thesemeasures are described below. Themeasures have been used

in previous reading studies of young Chinese children and were found to be sensitive to

individual differences in the current sample. Reliabilities of internal consistency of themeasures as calculated from the current data are shown in Table 1.

Measures of non-verbal intelligence

Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (Raven, Court & Raven, 1976), a measure of non-

verbal reasoning, was adopted to estimate participants’ intelligence. As the participants

were preschoolers, the short formwas used. Twelve itemswere presented to children. In

each,avisualmatrixwithonemissingpartwasshownandthestudentswereaskedtoselect,from six alternatives, the one that best completed thematrix. Themaximum scorewas 12.

Measure of English word reading

The study used a task earlier employed by McBride-Chang and Kail (2002) as a measure of

English word reading. Participants were shown a list of 30 common English words and


instructed to pronounce the printed words, one by one. One point was given for each

correct pronunciation; the maximum possible score was 30.

Measures of English oral language proficiency

English receptive vocabulary. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III) Form IIIA

(Dunn & Dunn, 1981) was adapted to measure English receptive vocabulary, which

served as an index of students’ oral English language proficiency. The experimenter orally

presented a series of 24 words from the 2- to 6-year-old subset; students were asked to

point to one of four pictures to identify each vocabulary word. One point was given for

every correctly identified word; the maximum possible score was 24. The stopping rulewas set at eight consecutive wrong responses.

English expressive vocabulary. A picture-naming task (Learning Disabilities Associa-

tion of Alberta, 2009) was employed to measure English expressive vocabulary, which

was used as another measure of oral language proficiency. Each child was presented with

15 pictures of common objects or animals, such as the sun or a frog, and prompted to

name each. One pointwas awarded for each correct answer; themaximumpossible scorewas 15.

Measures of English phonological awareness

English syllable deletion. This was a phonological awareness task in which students

were asked to delete a single syllable from a three-syllable English item (e.g., new

armchair, pink lipstick) presented orally by the experimenter (McBride-Chang et al.,

2004). There were two practice items and 15 testing items, each comprised of a three-

syllable stimulus with two words. Students were asked to delete the first, last, or middle

syllable from the word or phrase (e.g., say ‘black handbag’ without ‘bag’), five items for

Table 1. Means, standard deviations for all measures (N = 161)

Tasks Max M SD Range Reliabilities

Non-verbal intelligence

Raven’s progressive matrices 12 7.70 1.59 1–11 .81

English word measures

Word reading 30 6.78 6.67 0–27 .94

English oral language proficiency

PPVT 24 11.38 3.71 2–23 .70

Picture naming 15 5.57 3.44 0–14 .83

English phonological awareness

Syllable deletion 15 3.38 4.00 0–14 .90

Rhyme detection 10 4.15 2.06 0–9 .51

Phoneme identification 8 3.17 1.85 0–7 .68

Letter knowledge

Letter identification 26 20.33 6.00 0–26 .91

Chinese phonological awareness

Rhyme detection 10 5.70 2.05 0–10 .61

Tone detection 10 5.75 2.02 1–10 .69


each syllable position. One point was awarded for each correct item; the maximum

possible score was 15. The stopping rule was set at five consecutive wrong responses.

English rhyme detection. This task, which was taken from the Phonological Awareness

Test (Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1997), consisted of two practice items and 10

testing items. A stimulus word was presented to the students, who were then asked to

choose, from a list of three words, the one that rhymed with or had the same ending

sounds as the stimulus word. For example, if boat were the target word and the three

words listed were food, bike and coat, the correct answer would be coat. To aid memory

load, pictures of the words were shown when the experimenter read each of them out.

One point was given for each correct response; the maximum possible score was 10.

English phoneme identification. This task was used to assess the children’s phonemic

sensitivity. In this 8-item task (horse, fish, knife, gate, dog, ship, card and bone), the

children were shown a series of pictures. The experimenter pronounced the word once

and then the first part of the word (two phonemes) associated with the picture. The

children were then asked to finish the word by providing the last phoneme. The number

of phonemes pronounced correctly by the children was recorded. For example, for theword ‘dog’, the experimenter would pronounce the word once and then provided the

first two phonemes (‘do’). The correct response was /g/. Before the test items, two

demonstration items were provided. One point was awarded for each correct response;

the maximum possible score was 8. The stopping rule was set at four consecutive wrong

identifications.

Measure of letter knowledge

The aim of the letter identification task was to assess letter name knowledge. Students

were presented with lower case English letters in random order and asked to name them.

One point was awarded for each correct response; the maximum possible score was 26.

Measures of Chinese phonological awareness skills

Chinese rhyme detection. This measure was adopted from So and Siegel (1997) and

included two practice items and 10 experimental items. For each item, three Chinese

characters with the same tonewere read out by the experimenter. Students were asked to

repeat the three Chinese characters and then tell which two characters rhymedwith each

other (e.g., [fu]2 [ ], [gu]2 [ ], [seoi]2 [ ], the answer was [fu]2 and [gu]2, which share thesame rime). The tones of the characters in each item were the same. One point was

awarded for each correct answer; the maximum possible score was 10.

Cantonese tone detection. This task was adapted from So and Siegel’s (1997) study and

consisted of two demonstration items and 10 test items. For each item, childrenwere read

threeChinesecharacters and instructed to tellwhichof the twocharacters shared thesame

tone(e.g., [kwan]3 [ ], [kwan]3 [ ] and[kwan]4 [ ]).All stimuliwerepresentedorally.Onepoint was awarded for each correct answer; the maximum possible score was 10.


Procedures

Permission was sought from school principals to ask students to participate in the study;

parental consent was then sought for each prospective participant. Students whose

parents consented to their participation were tested individually in a quiet room at theattending school by trained experimenters. All tasks were administered in Cantonese and

in ways that the young students were able to understand. Each assessment lasted around

30 min.

Results

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations, ranges, and reliabilities of internal

consistency of all tasks in this study. Preliminary inspection of data shows that all tasks

were completed with good variability.

Correlations among measures

Partial intercorrelations of all measures, after controlling for the effects of age and generalintelligence, and zero-order correlations are presented inTable 2. As shown, Englishword

Table 2. Partial and zero-order correlations between all measures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1. English

word reading

– .45*** .63*** .49*** .38*** .50*** .55*** .05 .28***

2. English

receptive

vocabulary

.43*** – .72*** .32*** .19* .33*** .40*** .02 .13

3. English

picture

naming

.62*** .71*** – .50*** .41*** .22** .31*** .02 .25***

4. English

syllable

deletion

.47*** .30*** .39*** – .37*** .37*** .41*** .16* .35***

5. English

rhyme

detection

.36*** .16* .20** .34*** – .28*** .23** .15* .24**

6. English

phoneme

identification

.50*** .32*** .31*** .36*** .28*** – .50*** .08 .20**

7. Letter

identification

.55*** .40*** .55*** .40*** .21** .51*** – .08 .30***

8. Chinese rhyme

detection

.01 -.06 -.06 .11 .12 .06 .05 – .09

9. Chinese tone

detection

.26*** .11 .23** .32*** .22** .19* .28*** .05 –

Note. Partial correlationswith age and general intelligence controlled are shown under the diagonal of the

table and zero-order correlations are shown above the diagonal; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.


reading was significantly correlated with phonological awareness at varied levels, with

correlation coefficients ranging from .36 (rhyme awareness) to .50 (phonemic

awareness). English word reading was significantly associated with Chinese tone

awareness (r = .26), but not with Chinese rhyme awareness (r = .01). There were fairlyhigh and significant correlations between English word reading and oral language

proficiency measures (.40 < r < .65).

Among the three phonological awareness tasks, syllable awareness was moderately

correlated with both rhyme awareness (r = .34) and phonemic awareness (r = .36).

Chinese phonological awareness, especially tone awareness, was significantly correlated

with English syllable awareness (r = .32, p < .001), rhyme awareness (r = .22, p < .01),

and phonemic awareness (r = .19, p < .05).

Predicting English word reading from phonological awareness and oral language

proficiency

Hierarchical regression analysis was performed to answer the first research question

that English phonological awareness at the fine-grain levels and oral language skills

would significantly associate with English word reading. We tested to what extent

English phonological awareness and oral language skills would associate with English

word reading. General intelligence (Raven’s progressive matrices) and age wereentered in step 1. In step 2, we entered letter knowledge (letter identification) because

a major focus of the current kindergarten English learning curriculum is the teaching

of letter names. Letter reading has been shown to be a unique literacy-related predictor

of English reading in both native English speakers and young Chinese ESL students

(McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005; Muter et al., 1997). Letter name knowledge can be

regarded as a proxy of the amount of language learning to which the participating

children were exposed. Therefore, in this model, the individual differences on the

amount of previous English learning were taken into consideration. In step 3, weadded the picture naming measure (expressive vocabulary) because vocabulary

learning is another major focus of the current kindergarten English learning

curriculum. Finally, phonological awareness measures were entered from larger to

smaller grain size in step 4 to step 6, following the developmental trajectory of

phonological awareness (Anthony et al., 2003). It is of our interest to test the idea that

phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) would account

for unique additional variance when phonological awareness at the syllabic level is

statistically controlled.As shown in Table 3, the total variance explained by the model was 56%, F

(8,152) = 24.31, p < .001. It can be seen that phonological awareness explained an

additional 10% of variance after controlling for background variables, letter knowledge,

and oral language proficiency, ΔF(7,153) = 11.02, p < .001. Picture naming, syllable

awareness, rhyme detection and phoneme identification were uniquely associated with

English reading, the final beta weights are shown in Table 3 when all were entered into

the regression equations.

The results indicated that both oral language and phonological awareness uniquelycontributed to English word reading, after controlling for important background

variables. Among the three forms of English phonological awareness, phonemic

awareness, b = .23, t = 3.43, p < .001, emerged as the strongest predictor of English

reading. Picture naming, b = .40, t = 6.00, p < .001, a measure of expressive vocabulary,

emerged as the strongest predictor of English reading among oral language proficiency


measures. As expected, English phonological awareness at the fine-grain levels and oral

language proficiency are significantly associated with English word reading among

Chinese ESL kindergarteners.

Cross-language transfer and predicting English word reading and phonological

awareness by Chinese phonological awareness

To answer the second research question in this study, hierarchical regression analysis wasconducted on the prediction of Englishword reading byChinese phonological awareness,

with control variables (age and general intelligence) entered first, as shown in Table 4.

Based on correlational analysis, only the tone detection task was entered in the regression

model. We examined whether Chinese phonological awareness would explain unique

variance in English word reading, finding that, as expected, Chinese phonological

awareness at the tone level accounted for 7%of unique additional variance in Englishword

reading,ΔF(3,157) = 11.29, p < .001. Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness

from L1 to L2 was demonstrated.A more stringent test of cross-language transfer of tone awareness to English reading

was conducted byperforming similar regression analysis,while statistically controlling for

English phonological awareness in various forms. As presented inTable 4, tone awareness

still accounted for 3% and of additional variance when English phonemic awareness, ΔF(4,156) = 5.95, p < .05, and rhyme awareness, ΔF(4,156) = 6.45, p < .05, were entered

into the regression models, respectively. However, tone awareness did not account for

unique additional variance when syllable awareness was statistically controlled in the

regression model.Table 5 summarizes the results of R2 change and final beta weights in predicting the

three measures of English phonological awareness (syllable, rhyme, and phoneme) from

Chinese tone detection, after controlling for age and general intelligence. FromTable 5, it

can be seen that Chinese tone detection explained unique variance in varied levels of

English phonological awareness. More amount of unique additional variance in

phonological awareness at the syllabic levels was explained by tone detection, as

compared with that in phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels. The results

showed that L1 tone awareness was transferred to L2 at both the reading and meta-linguistic levels.

Table 3. R2, R2 change, F change, and final beta weight for hierarchical regression equations predicting

word reading from age, general intelligence, oral language proficiency, and phonological awareness

(N = 161)

Step/variable R2 ΔR2 ΔF Β t

1. Age Raven’s progressive matrices .03 .03 2.55+ .01

.02

.19

.36

2. Letter identification .32 .29 66.59*** .13 1.73+

3. Picture naming .46 .14 41.75*** .40 6.00***

4. English syllable deletion .50 .04 11.34*** .13 2.06*

5. English rhyme detection .53 .03 8.06** .14 2.39*

6. English phoneme identification .56 .03 11.75*** .23 3.43***

Note. ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05; +p < .1.


Discussion

In this study, we examined the extent to which Englishword readingwas associatedwith

L1 and L2 phonological awareness and oral language proficiency, as well as the extent to

which L1 and L2 phonological awareness was associated with one another among young

ESL learners in Hong Kong. Particularly, we were interested in testing whether

phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme), English orallanguage proficiency and Chinese tone awareness would be significant predictors of

Table 4. R2, R2 change, F change, and final beta weight for hierarchical regression equations predicting

word reading from age, general intelligence, L2 phonological awareness, and Chinese phonological

awareness (N = 161)

Step/variable R2 ΔR2 ΔF b t

Model 1


.04

.16

.49

2. Chinese tone detection .10 .07 11.29*** .26 3.36*

Model 2


.05

1.49

.69

2. English syllable deletion .24 .21 44.19*** .44 5.81***

3. Chinese tone detection .26 .02 2.74 .12 1.65

Model 3


.05

1.49

.69

2. English rhyme detection .15 .12 25.88 .32 4.20***

3. Chinese tone detection .18 .03 6.45* .19 2.54*

Model 4


.05

1.49

.69

2. English phoneme identification .28 .24 52.96*** .47 6.79***

3. Chinese tone detection .30 .03 5.95* .17 2.44*

Note. ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05; +p < .1.

Table 5. Final beta weight, R2, R2 change, and F change for hierarchical regression equations predicting

English phonological awareness from age, general intelligence, and Chinese phonological awareness

(N = 161)

Step/variable

Syllable deletion

Rhyme

detection

Phoneme

identification

Β t b t b t

Step 1 (ΔR2 = .06**) (ΔR2 = .04+) (ΔR2 = .03)

Age .10 1.31 .07 .86 �.11 �1.39

Raven’s progressive matrices .11 1.47 .09 1.12 .12 1.42

Step 2 (ΔR2 = .10***) (ΔR2 = .05**) (ΔR2 = .04*)

Chinese tone awareness .31 4.20*** .22 2.78** .19 2.45*

Note. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001; +p < .10.


beginning English reading among young Chinese ESL students. The findings highlight the

importance of phonological awareness at the fine-grain levels and oral language

proficiency in the beginning reading development of Chinese ESL children. The patterns

of association between L1 and L2 phonological awareness and relationships betweenphonological awareness in various forms and English reading allow the assessment of the

hypothesis of general phonological sensitivity underpinning reading development.

The findings demonstrated that, as expected, English word reading was uniquely

predicted by phonological awareness at the rhyme and phoneme when syllable

awareness and vocabulary were statistically controlled. Oral language proficiency was

uniquely associated with English word reading. Cross-language transfer of Chinese

phonological awareness at the tone level was shown in both English word reading and

English phonological awareness.

L2 word reading: the role of L2 phonological awareness

Our results show that phonological awareness accounted for a significant amount of

unique variance after controlling for age, cognitive processing variables, and L2

vocabulary. L2 phonemic awareness, as indexed by phoneme identification in the

present study, was the strongest predictor among various forms of phonological

awareness. The findings are consistent with past studies involving young students withalphabetic (e.g., Durgunoglu et al., 1993) and non-alphabetic L1 (e.g., Gottardo et al.,

2001; Keung & Ho, 2009). The present study goes beyond previous studies to show that

phonemic awareness plays a unique role, when syllable awareness is taken into account,

among Hong Kong kindergarteners with little direct instruction in letter sounds. Past

studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a more important phonological

awareness skill than rhyme and syllable awareness among L1 children (Adams, 1990;

Treiman & Zukowski, 1996). Most of the previous correlational and longitudinal studies

involving Hong Kong kindergarteners have not involved phonemic awareness tasks; anexception isMcBride-Chang andHo (2005), who found that a developmental spelling task

explained unique variance in English reading. Their task demanded phoneme level

knowledge, phonemic skills, and letter-sound awareness; the task used to assess

phonological awareness at the phoneme level in this study was more of a pure awareness

task, while the developmental spelling task involved orthographic skill, as it required

graphological output by the students. The present study thus is the first to demonstrate

the significant role of phonemic awareness amongHongKongChinese kindergarteners in

their English reading development.The phonemic awareness task used in this study, phoneme identification, is a relatively

easy task compared with the phoneme deletion task used in other studies on Hong Kong

ESL learners (Keung & Ho, 2009; McBride-Chang et al., 2004) or elsewhere (e.g., Lipka &

Siegel, 2007). Given sensitivemeasures, phonemic awareness is generally a good indicator

of L2word reading development, even among young students who have a non-alphabetic

L1 and who receive reading instruction mainly through holistic methods. To understand

the role of phonological awareness, it is important to identify what type of phonological

sensitivity plays a central role in literacy development andwhatmeasures of phonologicalsensitivity are appropriate for assessing children’s literacy development (Goswami,

2001). In a context inwhich reading is not taught analytically, this measure can be used as

both a research tool and an assessment instrument for a given student.

The significant contribution of L2 syllable awareness to L2 word reading found

in the present study replicates previous research on Hong Kong kindergarteners


(McBride-Chang et al., 2004). It has been argued elsewhere that syllable awareness is an

important phonological unit for Chinese ESL learners learning to read both Chinese and

English because every Chinese character represents a single syllable (e.g., Chow et al.,

2005; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). However, many past studies have used syllableawareness as the only measure of phonological awareness, and have not considered the

relative contribution of various other forms of phonological awareness to beginning

reading development; those that did include phonemic tasks, used phoneme deletion

tasks, as noted above. The present study, by incorporating phonological awareness at

three levels (syllable, rime and phoneme), shows that phonemic and rhyme awareness

(subsyllabic units) is more strongly associated with beginning English word reading than

syllable awareness.

Rhyme awareness has been identified as an important skill that children need toacquire for reading English among native speaking children because English is regarded

as an irregular orthography (Ziegler, Stone & Jacobs, 1997) and exhibits larger

phonological similarity at rime as compared with onset-vowel (Baayen, Piepenbrock &

van Rijn, 1993). Our findings that rhyme awareness explained unique variance in English

word reading, together with significant contribution of syllable awareness, seem to

suggest that, in line with psycholinguistic grain-size theory, phonological awareness at a

larger grain size, to a certain extent, is important for the development of English reading.

Our finding extends the previous literature on the L2 word reading among childrenlearning two very distinct orthographies.

L2 word reading: the role of oral language proficiency

As expected, oral language proficiency plays a unique role in beginning reading

performance among Hong Kong ESL learners. Of the two measures of English oral

language proficiency used, picture naming, a measure of expressive vocabulary, was the

best predictor of L2 reading. The receptive vocabulary measure is aWesternmeasure thatmay include items that are unfamiliar or culturally meaningless to Hong Kong students.

Consequently, task sensitivity to individual differences may be compromised. However,

the picture naming task, in which students were asked to name objects or animals, was

very familiar to the participants, as they are often asked to do so in English lessons. This

measure, which is highly associated with reading performance (r = .60), may be used as a

screening task for early language learning problems.

The present research shows that oral language proficiency explains 14% of unique

variance after controlling for background variables and letter name knowledge. Previousstudies involving young learners from diverse linguistic backgrounds, however, generally

report that L2 oral language proficiency explains approximately 3–4% of variance (Geva,

2006; Gottardo, 2002). Some studies even demonstrate a non-significant or limited role

after controlling for phonological awareness (Durgunoglu et al., 1993; Geva & Siegel,

2000; Geva et al., 2000; Gholamain & Geva, 1999). Compared with other studies

involving ESL students, the present findings indicate a more central role for oral language

proficiency in predicting beginning reading among ESL students in a Chinese-speaking

environment. It is noteworthy that the current sample is a low-proficiency group whoseoral language exposure is limited to English lesson time (around 40–60 min/week). A

possible explanation is that, in beginning L2 reading development, childrenmay relymore

on oral language to adjust or predict the pronunciation of printedwords (Gottardo, 2002).

Alternatively, as Hong Kong preschoolers’ metalinguistic L1 and L2 skills are not well

developed, more individual differences can be explained by oral language measures.


Future research may consider the inclusion of students with varied L2 oral proficiency to

show a clearer relationship between L2 language proficiency and L2 reading among

Chinese ESL learners.

Cross-language transfer between non-alphabetic and alphabetic languages

In this study, we examined whether Chinese rhyme awareness and tone awareness were

transferrable fromL1 to L2.We found that tone awareness uniquely contributed to English

word reading and English phonological awareness, but rhyme awareness did not. This

study is the first to present initial evidence that tone awareness is uniquely associatedwith

English reading, even among very young Chinese ESL learners, just as among older

Chinese students (Wang et al., 2005). Interestingly, it demonstrates that the influence ofL1 phonological processing at a completely different level might contribute to L2 reading

development in Chinese ESL children. This language-specific feature contribution to L2

reading development deserves further investigation.

The finding that L1 and L2 phonological awareness plays a significant role in English

reading and that phonological awareness tasks tend to associatewith one another (except

for the Chinese rhyme awareness task) supports the idea that a general phonological

competence underlies both L1 and L2 reading (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison &

Lacroix, 1999; Durgunoglu et al., 1993; Lindsey et al., 2003). Similar to findings on otherESL or bilingual groups learning to read two alphabetical languages (e.g., Cisero & Royer,

1995; Comeau et al., 1999), there is a transfer of phonological awareness from L1 to L2

among Chinese ESL children. The results are also consistent with research involving

Chinese–English bilingual children (Chow et al., 2005; Gottardo et al., 2001; Tong &

McBride-Chang, 2010). Despite great differences in the linguistic properties of Chinese

and English and the weak phonological awareness skills of Hong Kong Chinese students,

the results suggest that phonological skills or sensitivity to sounds might be common

competences children need to acquire in beginning reading development (Hu & Catts,1998; Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008; Perfetti, Liu & Tan, 2005).

The current findings that tone awareness remained a significant predictor of English

word reading when rhyme and phonemic awareness were entered into the regression

model, but not when syllable awareness was entered, highlight the overlapping between

syllable awareness and tone awareness. Tone awareness in Chinese is related to syllable

processing because tone is the integral component of Chinese syllables. However, tone

awareness still uniquely accounted for English word reading when rhyme and phonemic

awarenesswereenteredintotheregressionmodelsanduniquelypredictedvariousformsofL2 phonological awareness. The findings suggest that some forms of general phonological

processing possibly underpin reading development. In addition, the findings underscore

the importance of the L1 phonological awareness in L2 phonological awareness

development that is a crucial building block for future reading development. Nonetheless,

we acknowledged that the response format of the tone awareness task and the English

syllable taskweresimilar and it ispossible that theuniqueeffectof the toneawarenesswasa

measurement issue. Further research should try to establish a clear distinction between

toneawarenessandsyllableawarenessinChinesebothconceptuallyandmethodologically.However, the current results show that the transfer of L1 phonological awareness was

only evident at the tone level, but not at the rhyme level. Rhyme awareness was not

significantly correlated with L2 phonological awareness measures and L2 word reading.

The findings are not consistent with past studies showing cross-language transfer of

rhyme awareness among ESL children (Gottardo et al., 2001; Keung & Ho, 2009). It is


possible that the tone awareness was better developed among the participating children

than rhyme awareness, given that they receive no instruction on Chinese phonological

awareness. The task sensitivity to individual differences is relatively low, and thus was

unable to account for performance in other phonological and reading measures. Futureresearch should develop more sensitive phonological awareness measures for Chinese

ESL children with weak phonological awareness.

Limitations and educational implications

There were a number of limitations to the present study. First, only two Chinese

phonological awareness measures have been included, meaning that L1 phonological

processing at different levels has not been fully covered. Future research may furtherexplore the relative contribution of Chinese phonological awareness at different levels

(e.g., the phonemic level) to beginning reading development among Chinese children.

Second, this research is correlational in nature and causal conclusions cannot be drawn

among variables. Oral language proficiency, phonological awareness, and reading

development may have bi-directional relationships, but the current findings cannot

disentangle causal associations. Training studies may help reveal causal relationships

among the variables. Third, some measures used in the present study suffered from low

reliabilities, particularly the rhyme awareness task in both L1 and L2. There is a lack ofstandardized measures of phonological awareness for Chinese children. The rhyme

detection measure might not be a good test of rhyme awareness, and the inclusion of

pictures to ease memory load might be confusing for Hong Kong young children, given

their weak phonological awareness. Future research should examine the construct

validity of the phonological awareness measures.

The unique and significant contribution of phonological awareness to beginning

readingpoints to the need to teach analytical phonology skills to helpChinese ESL learners

acquire L2 reading abilities. Explicit and direct instruction in acquiring the alphabeticprincipal has been shown to be a key to helping students learn to read English (Rayner,

Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky& Seidenberg, 2001). Educators in the fieldmay consider how

to incorporate phonological elements, particularly phonemic awareness, into early

English learning in preschool settings.

The importance of oral language proficiency suggests that mastery of L2 oral skills and

phonological awareness may be beneficial for young Hong Kong students, who face high

literacy demands in both Chinese and English. Inmany Hong Kong preschool classrooms,

the teaching of English heavily emphasizes written exercises and children generally havelittle exposure to oral language, unlike other ESL groups in Canada or the United States.

ESL students have been reported to be lag behind their L1 counterparts in vocabulary

development (Jean & Geva, 2009) and are less likely to learn vocabulary via incidental

learning or text reading (Proctor, Carlo, August & Snow, 2005); rather explicit instruction

is needed (August, Carlo, Dressler & Snow, 2005). The current findings shed light on the

English learning curriculum for young Hong Kong ESL students.

Conclusion

This study examines the role of L1 and L2 phonological awareness and oral language

proficiency in beginning English reading among Chinese ESL students. It contributes to

the literature in three areas: (1) Consistent with literature identifying phonological

awareness as an important predictor of English reading among young students learning


English as an L2, this study shows that phonological awareness at varying linguistic units is

closely related to the English reading of ESL childrenwith a non-alphabetic L1 and limited

exposure to oral English in everyday life. In particular, it has identified the differential

importance of syllable, rhyme and phonemic awareness, suggesting that the latter isrelativelymore important. (2)While confirming that oral language skills and phonological

awareness are significant predictors of English word reading, this study has demonstrated

that the contribution of phonological awareness is greater still, when oral language skills

are taken into account. These findings highlight the importance of providing phonolog-

ical-based instruction to young Chinese ESL students, given that existing instruction for

these children emphasizes language learning. (3) With regard to cross-language transfer,

this study demonstrates cross-language transfers in very young ESL students, and

highlights the importance of L1 tone awareness. Phonological awareness, which isexamined in an educational context with very limited exposure to phonological

instruction yielding such findings, suggests the importance of phonological awareness to

L2 reading and the need for further inquiry and investigation into instructional practice

and cross-language issues in reading.

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Phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in learning to read English among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong