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Our research focuses on the following topics:
Shared Book Reading Intervention
To increase students' volume of exposure to rich, natural
written Chinese, through reading aloud by adults for premier school
students. Students who
experience a greater volume of written language are expected to become
more competent and interested readers than students who receive only
the standard curriculum, which stresses intensive reading of a limited
number of texts.
Orthographic instruction Intervention
To develop instructional activities to increase students'
awareness of morphemes, and the mapping between morphemes and characters.
Instructional activities requires students to segment words into
component morphemes, and to recognize the relationships among words
which share a common morpheme (and hence, a common character). Students
who receive instruction in morphology, which is not now emphasized
in the Chinese language curriculum, are expected to make substantially
better progress in learning to read than students who do not.
Language Transfer in Bilingual Children
Having a phonologically richer native language
and early bilingual experience may be the reason that Cantonese children
could outperform Mandarin children in Mandarin phonological awareness
tasks.
Tracking Analysis of Poor reader’s Language Development
We complete situated, dynamic assessments of factors
that facilitate or inhibit the progress of poor readers during classroom
instruction.
We did video taping children’s language development in classrooms.
Phonological Awareness in Chinese
Children learned to pronounce more regular characters,
which contain full information about pronunciation, and more tone-different
and onset-different characters, which contain partial information
about pronunciation, than characters with unknown phonetic components,
which contain no information about pronunciation.
Visual Perception in Chinese
Chinese children encode characters into
familiar chunks. Major functional components – simple characters
that serve as the semantic or phonetic radicals of compound characters--
are more readily perceived as chunks than subcomponents that do not
represent semantic or phonological information, but the contrast
with arbitrary stroke patterns shows that even subcomponents are
serving as perceptual chunks.
Children's development of writing
Studies of children learning to write have shown
that children do not merely rely on simple rote memory when they learn
to write words, but rather take advantage of the different kinds of
systematic information inherent in the writing system.
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