Developmental interdependence between word decoding, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension in young L2 readers of Chinese

Abstract

This chapter reports on a study that explored developmental interdependence between lexical competence and reading comprehension in young L2 readers of Chinese. Participants were ethnic Chinese children with English as the dominant home language in Singapore. The same battery of tests was administered three times across a year, that is, end of Grade 3 (Time 1), middle of Grade 4 (Time 2), and end of Grade 4 (Time 3), to measure children’s word decoding, oral vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. The three waves of data were fitted to a cross-lagged panel model where in addition to its earlier performance predicting its later performance (i.e., autoregressive effect), each of the three literacy variables was hypothesized to predict the other two at an immediate later time (i.e., crossed effect). It was found that word decoding, as opposed to vocabulary knowledge, surfaced as a unique longitudinal lexical predictor of reading comprehension; this was similarly the case from Time 1 to Time 2 and from Time 2 to Time 3. Conversely, however, reading comprehension was not found to be a significant longitudinal predictor of either decoding or vocabulary after accounting for the respective autoregressive effect.