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The Effect of Pinyin Learning on the Development of Phonological The Effect of Pinyin Learning on the Development of Phonological Awareness and English Reading and Spelling CHONG Ka Yan A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy A ？ �― in . \ • I� Psychology • t - O • © The Chinese University of Hong Kong August 2005 The Chinese University of Hong Kong holds the copyright of this thesis. Any person(s) intending to use a part or whole of the materials in the thesis in a proposed publication must seek copyright release from the Dean of the Graduate School. ^^統系‘書圓 g(l8 i 21 ji ^~UNIVERSITY-遍 NggXUBRARY SYSTEj^f M Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Him Cheung, my thesis supervisor, who had provided continuous support and insightful comments for this research. I would also like to thank Professor Catherine McBride-Chang for her valuable comments on the research proposal and the writing of this thesis, as well as her advice and encouragements given at various stage of my academic training in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I sincerely thank Professor H.C. Chen for his valuable comments on the thesis proposal. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to Miss Echo Pao of H.K.F.Y.G. Lee Shau Kee Primary School. Without her kind support and coordination, the longitudinal study would not have materialized. Lastly, many thanks also to my husband for his support to my academic pursuit. Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English ii ABSTRACT Although students in Hong Kong begin to leam English since kindergarten, their phonemic awareness has been found to be very limited in previous research. Since there is a wealth of literature showing that phonemic awareness is very important to successful English reading and spelling, and yet the opacity of the written English does not promote the development of phonemic awareness, the present study attempts to examine if learning Hanyu-Pinyin, a transparent transcription system, can enhance phonemic awareness in Hong Kong students, and hence their English reading and spelling. Since past phonological awareness transfer studies focus only on transfer between a first and a foreign language and vice versa, the present study represents a novel attempt to examine phonological awareness transfer between two foreign languages. By contrasting Mandarin-learning children who learn Pinyin with those who do not, the present study provides a valuable opportunity to examine orthographic effect independent of oral language effect. Results showed that Pinyin training effectively enhanced Hong Kong students' phonemic awareness across languages, over and above the effect of oral language. Analyses also showed direct phonological awareness transfer between two foreign languages. Moreover, Pinyin training also enhanced students' English pseudoword reading and nonword spelling performance, though its effect on English real word reading was not found. I also found that phonological awareness did not fully explain the unique effect caused by Pinyin training, and I suggest that the print related element of phonological skills brought about by the Pinyin training can account for this gap. Finally, theoretical and pedagogical implications of the results are discussed. Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English iii 漢語拼音學習對語音意識發展和英語學習的影響 摘要 香港的學生雖然從小接觸英語，但硏究發現他們在音素層面的語音意識發展相 當有限。由於大量文獻指出音素層面的語音意識對英語閱讀和拼寫有莫大幫 助，但英文本身字母與音素間的關係比較複雜，不利刺激音素意識的發展，本 硏究嘗試探討學習漢語拼音，一種比較簡單的字母書寫系統，能否提高香港學 生的音素意識，從而間接提升他們在英語學習上的能力。此外，以往在語音意 識遷移上的硏究只集中在第一與第二語言間的遷移，本硏究則探討語音意識在 兩個第二語言間遷移的可能性，故此，本硏究在探討語音意識遷移的問題上開 托出一個新的層次。而透過與沒有學習拼音的香港普通話學生作比較，本硏究 也提供了一個分開文字和口語各自對語音意識發展的影響的獨特機會。結果發 現，拼音訓練不但能有效提高香港學生的普通話音素意識，更能間接提高他們 在廣東話和英語上的音素意識。分析更顯示，音素意識在兩個第二語言間的直 接遷移是可能的。另外，拼音訓練亦能提升學生拼讀跟拼寫英文假字的能力， 但在英文真字閱讀上未見有即時影響。此外，本硏究發現音素意識並未能完全 解釋拼音組與非拼音組在拼讀跟拼寫英文假字上表現的差異，相信其餘的原因 跟拼音學習對文字技巧的提升有關。最後，本文對這些硏究結果對理論及教學 的意義作一些討論。 Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i ABSTRACT ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1 PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AS A PREDICTOR OF ENGLISH READING AND SPELLING 1 LEVELS OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 4 FACTORS AFFECTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS ..... 6 ORAL LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE 6 ORTHOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE 8 PHONOLOGICAL TRAINING 8 TRANSFER OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN BILINGUAL STUDIES 9 FACTORS AFFECTING THE TRANSFER OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 11 INTRODUCTION TO HANYU PINYIN 13 THE PRESENT STUDY 14 CHAPTER II: STUDY 1 18 METHOD 18 DESIGN 18 PARTICIPANTS 19 PROCEDURES 20 TASKS 20 RESULTS 25 GROUP DIFFERENCES ON PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND ENGLISH MEASURES 25 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND PINYIN PERFORMANCE ON ENGLISH READING AND SPELLING 28 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES 33 DISCUSSION 34 Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English v CHPAPTER III: STUDY 2 36 METHOD 36 DESIGN 36 PARTICIPANTS 37 PROCEDURES 38 TASKS 39 RESULTS 42 EFFECT OF PINYIN TRAINING ON PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 48 TRANSFER OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 50 EFFECT OF PINYIN TRAINING ON ENGLISH READING AND SPELLING 52 DECOMPOSING THE EFFECT OF PINYIN TRAINING ON ENGLISH READING AND SPELLING 53 DISCUSSION 59 CHPATER IV: GENERAL DISCUSSION 65 LIMITATIONS 67 CONCLUSION 69 REFERENCES 70 APPENDIX A: ENGLISH VOCABULARY TEST (STUDY 1) 76 APPENDIX B: NONWORD SPELLING TASK ITEMS (STUDY 1) 77 APPENDIX C: PSEUDOWORD READING ITEMS (STUDYL) 78 APPENDIX D: PHONEMIC ONSET DELETION TASK (CANTONESE) 79 APPENDIX E: PHONEMIC ONSET DELETION TASK (MANDARIN) 80 APPENDIX F: PHONEMIC ONSET DELETION TASK (ENGLISH) 81 APPENDIX G: NONWORD SPELLING TASK ITEMS (STUDY 2) 82 APPENDIX H: PSEUDOWORD READING ITEMS (STUDY2) 83 APPENDIX J: PINYIN TEST (STUDY 2) 84 APPENDIX K: MANDARIN ORAL TEST (STUDY 2) 85 Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English 1 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Phonological Awareness as a Predictor of English Reading and Spelling Phonological awareness can be broadly defined as the ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Mattingly, 1972). There are two important properties of this concept: First, it relates purely to the sound level of manipulation and does not involve print. Second, the processing of speech sound is explicit and deliberate. This is opposed to the unconscious ability to discriminate speech sounds as in speech perception. Apart from this definition, phonological awareness can be best understood from the tasks that are used to measure it. In a phonological awareness task, a participant is asked either to match, delete or substitute specific sound unit of the spoken words presented. For example, in a phoneme onset deletion task, a syllable 'cash' /kae// without the phoneme onset is /ae//. Over the past three decades, researchers have argued that such ability in analyzing speech sound is crucial to the process of reading acquisition. There is now a wealth of evidence accumulated showing that the more knowledge children have about the constituent sounds of words, the better they tend to be at reading. This evidence has mainly come in two forms. The first form is correlational study, where measures of phonological awareness and reading are either taken concurrently or longitudinally. The second type is training studies, where children receiving phonological training are compared to their peers without training. A landmark study by Bradley and Bryant (1983) examined relations between phonological awareness and reading in a large group of children over a 4-year period. They tested children with an odd-man-out sound categorization task at age 4 to 5 and measured their IQ, reading, spelling and mathematics in subsequent years. They found that there were high correlations between initial sound categorization skills and children's subsequent reading and spelling over three years even after Pinyin, Phonological Awareness and English 2 1 controlling the influence of intelligence and memory ability. In addition, they also selected a group of 65 children who could not read and had low sound categorization ability in the initial test for a training experiment. These children were divided into 4 groups: sound categorization group, sound categorization plus letter training group, conceptual categorization group and a control group. After two years of training, they found that children in the two sound categorization training groups outperformed their peers in the control groups on reading and spelling, but not on mathematics. In other words, they showed that phonological awareness training specifically enhanced children's reading and spelling skills. Furthermore, they found that the training group that received alphabet illustrations was performing better than the other training group that received only sound categorization training. Together with the results of the correlational study, the authors concluded that there was a causal relationship between early phonological awareness and subsequent reading and spelling ability. Not only did studies find that those who have a higher level of phonological awareness tend to be better readers, but studies on the dyslexic population also found that dyslexics show deficits in phonological awareness. For example, Bradley and Bryant (1978) showed that older disabled readers performed more poorly on the odd-one-out task than their younger peers matched on reading level. Since the older readers should have had at least as much reading instruction and practice as their younger peers did, the result could not be due to a lack of practice in reading.
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