As an effective teaching approach that allows teachers and students to interact collaboratively and actively build on each other’s ideas, dialogic teaching can enhance classroom engagement and learning outcomes. This study addresses the use of dialogic teaching for improving English language learning among Chinese children with varied levels of English vocabulary. It focuses on the effects of dialogic teaching on vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness. Seventy-two first graders from Hong Kong primary schools were tested on English vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness and were assigned to control and experimental conditions. A 12-week dialogic teaching intervention was implemented in daily English lessons. Results from repeated measures ANOVA showed that students in the experimental condition with dialogic teaching implemented exhibited significantly greater growth in expressive vocabulary knowledge on textbook items in both low and high vocabulary groups, and greater gain in phonological awareness in the high vocabulary group, than those in the control condition. These results suggest that dialogic teaching in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classroom enhances English language development in young ESL learners. In addition, when assessing the effectiveness of dialogic teaching in young children’s second language classroom context, it is important to consider its differential effects on children with diverse vocabulary levels. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).

Young Chinese children acquire a substantial amount of Chinese characters during their early years. Because Character recognition is foundational to higher level Chinese reading (e.g., text comprehension, it is crucial to identify factors associated with early acquisition of Chinese characters. Chinese is a morpho-syllabic language in which each character corresponds to one morpheme and one syllable. Morphemes can be combined further in specific ways to make up words. In the kindergarten period from ages 3 to 6, Chinese children progress gradually from learning some single-character words to the vast majority of double-character words. In Hong Kong, traditional kindergartens typically start to teach children to read Chinese characters in the second semester of their first kindergarten year, when they are approximately 3.5 years old. Most Hong Kong children learn Chinese in the form of traditional script with Cantonese, which is their native language, as the medium of instruction through a teaching approach of “look and say.” Language impairment often places children at risk for reading difficulties, suggesting that meta-linguistic skills may contribute to the development of Chinese character recognition. Chinese characters contain rich visual-spatial features and relations (e.g., more than 2,000 different graphic patterns to be learned by novice readers). Consequently, some researchers have suggested that visual-spatial skills may support children’s learning of Chinese characters, especially in beginning readers. The present study aims to examine the contributions of meta-linguistic and visualspatial skills to Chinese character recognition in young Chinese children. A longitudinal sample of 106 Hong Kong Chinese children were tested a total of five times from their first to third kindergarten years. Chinese character recognition, meta-linguistic skills (phonological awareness and visual-orthographic awareness), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual-spatial

Traditionally, children in Hong Kong are taught to read English by reading/memorizing the whole English words followed by sentences and stores. Many research studies on English reading support that phonological awareness is crucial to reading success. A study is conducted in Hong Kong to examine the phonological awareness approach in developing English reading skills among preschool children who learn English as their second language. Participants were 5-year old children studying the last year of preschool education, the year before formal primary schooling. Children in the experimental group (182) received phonological awareness training for about 6 months while the children in the control group (166) were taught with their original English curriculum. Children in the experimental group performed significantly better in both reading-related tasks (picture naming and word reading) and reading-related skills (rhyme detection and phoneme identification). Results indicate that phonological awareness training is an effective approach to the development of English reading skills among Hong Kong children. The findings of the project will provide data to facilitate the school curriculum planning and suggest changing teaching practices in English reading so as to prevent difficulties in learning.

The study investigated the phonological awareness abilities of Cantonese-speaking pre-schoolers with cochlear implants. Participants were 15 Cantonese-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) aged 3.08-6.10, chronological-age-matched with 15 children with normal hearing. Each participant performed 10 tasks evaluating different levels of phonological awareness abilities and phonological knowledge. The results showed that pre-schoolers with cochlear implants and their normal hearing peers had similar levels of syllable awareness, phoneme awareness and rhyme awareness. However, cochlear implant users showed significantly poorer performance on tone awareness and phonological knowledge tasks than their normal hearing peers. Cantonese-speaking pre-schoolers with cochlear implants were able to develop phonological awareness. However, the cochlear implants might not provide enough tonal information for children with hearing impairment for tonal lexical comprehension. Incomplete speech and language stimulation may affect phonological knowledge development in Cantonese-speaking pre-schoolers with cochlear implants.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2011.604428]