Facets of Metalinguistic Awareness Related to
Reading Development of CFL Learners
Su (苏小湘),
Learning to read is a complex process that builds on cognitive, linguistic and social factors. Metalinguistic awareness, the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of languages, has generally been agreed to play a critical role in reading development (e.g., Gombert, 1992; Nagy & Anderson, 1998). The most studied facet of metalinguitic awareness is phonological awareness, which is believed to be of great importance in reading across languages (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Kuo & Anderson, 2008). Morphological awareness is another facet of metalinguistic awareness that is widely believed to make a unique contribution to reading (Koda, 2008).
Radicals, the subcomponents of characters, are a unique feature of Chinese. They encode both phonological and semantic information and they follow positional and functional rules when combined to form characters (Wang & Yang, 2008). It has been showed that the knowledge about positional and functional rules is important in skilled reading and emergent reading (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999; Ho et al., 2003). Yet its role in L2/FL reading is not so clear.
This study examined the development of knowledge about positional and functional rules (radical awareness) among Chinese-as-foreign-language learners. Three tests (a character legality test, a character-meaning-matching test, and a character-writing test) aiming at measuring radical awareness were administered to a group of 98 college CFL learners. It has been found that radical awareness increases as they progress in their studies, and it was also shown that knowledge about the positional and functional rules is significantly related to word acquisition across language proficiency levels. These findings suggest that radical awareness plays an important role at both beginning and later stage of L2 reading development, just like it does in L1 reading acquisition.