Background: Studies have shown that word dictation and syntactic skills are significant predictors of written composition performance among Chinese children in elementary grades. However, there is a paucity of research on the bidirectional relationships between these two cognitive‐linguistic skills (i.e., word dictation and syntactic skills) and Chinese writing skills. Methods: This paper reports the findings of a 1‐year longitudinal study tracking the developmental patterns of Chinese writing among students in Grades 3 and 5 in Hong Kong. The participants were administered tasks involving cognitive‐linguistic skills (working memory, word dictation and syntactic skills) and writing skills (narrative writing and expository writing). Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed that word dictation and syntactic skills in Grades 3 and 5 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese written composition performance in Grade 4 and Grade 6. Syntactic skills, but not word dictation, contributed a significant amount of unique variance to writing performance after controlling for the autoregressor effect of writing. The results also showed that written composition performance in Grades 3 and 5 contributed unique variance to individual differences in syntactic skills in Grades 4 and 6, after controlling for syntactic skills in the preceding year and other cognitive‐linguistic variables. Conclusion: The patterns of results underscore the significance of syntactic skills in Chinese written composition in upper elementary grades and the bidirectional relationship between syntactic skills and written composition in Chinese. Highlights: What is already known about this topicChinese word dictation, syntactic skills and verbal working memory are the major types of developmental skills important in Chinese writing among children in elementary grades. What this paper addsThe longitudinal contribution of word dictation to writing performance across grades was mediated by the contribution

The present study aimed to investigate the contribution of oral language skills, linguistic skills, and transcription skills to Chinese written composition among Grade 4 students in Hong Kong. Measures assessing verbal working memory, oral language skills, linguistic skills (i.e., syntactic skills and discourse skills), transcription skills (i.e., spelling), and written composition were administered to Chinese fourth graders (N = 259). Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that only spelling and syntactic skills contributed significant unique variance to written composition. The relevance of the differences between the spoken Cantonese dialect and Modern Standard Written Chinese to these findings concerning the development of children's written composition is explored.
[Copyright of Discourse Processes: a multidisciplinary journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2013.841070]

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2010.482149]

The present study attempted to address the paucity of developmental data on English reading and spelling development among Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. English reading and spelling development among Chinese ESL learners in Hong Kong was examined in a one-year longitudinal study covering three developmental periods: Kindergarten to Grade 1, Grade 2 to Grade 3, and Grade 4 to Grade 5. One hundred and fifty five participants were tested on three types of cognitive-linguistic measures (rapid naming, phonological processing, and visual-orthographic processing) and language proficiency measures (English reading, English spelling and Chinese reading). Three major patterns of results were identified. First, the relationships between cognitive-linguistic skills and English proficiency measures differed among Chinese ESL learners of different proficiency levels. Previous research examining the significance of visual-orthographic and phonological skills to English reading and spelling development among Hong Kong Chinese ESL learners has yielded inconsistent results. On one hand, findings in some studies among kindergarteners and Grade 1 students demonstrated the predominant role of phonological skills to English reading and spelling development (Chow, McBride-Chang, & Burgess, 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). On the other hand, the study by Leong, Tan, Cheng and Hau (2005) among Grade 4 – 6 students showed that visual-orthographic skills were of greater significance than phonological skills in predicting English proficiency. Since the participants in these studies were from different age groups, differences in results may simply reflect differences in age or ‘stages’ of reading and spelling development among the participants. Findings in the present study did confirm this speculation: phonological skills were of particular importance to English reading and spelling development among younger participants while the significance