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

Due to their logographic nature, Chinese characters are traditionally learned with a whole-word approach. Starting from kindergarten, students in Hong Kong learn Chinese and English words and attain bilingual literacy in this way. However, this type of learning results in low levels of both Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) phonological awareness (PA). Phonological awareness is not only significant for emergent literacy in an alphabetic language but also for decoding unfamiliar words. For this reason, Hong Kong students have difficulty learning to read English (especially sounding out and spelling unfamiliar words). Meanwhile, Chinese readers in mainland China and other places who learn to read Chinese with a phonetic script are found to have higher phonological awareness of Chinese (Bertelson, Chen & de Gelder, 1997; H. Cheung et al., 2001; Holm & Dodd, 1996; Huang & Hanley, 1995; Read et al., 1986).
In light of the advantage brought about by a native phonetic script, the present research aims to investigate the effect of Cantonese phonological awareness on English learning by comparing the performances of an Experimental Group with phonological awareness training and a Control Group without training, both before and after training.
Two experiments were conducted from 2003 to 2004. In the pilot experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 8) which had received 10 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction had no immediate advantage over the control group (n = 9) concerning their post-training English phonological awareness test. However, after the two groups had received 10 hours of English phonics instruction, the Experimental Group a made significantly bigger mean progress than the Control Group (p = 0.035) in their post-training English phonological awareness test. In the main experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 19) which had received 20 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction made a bigger mean progress than Control Group 1 (n = 20) and Control Group

This study examined the roles of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, measured using twelve different tasks hypothesized to indicate these four broad constructs, in Chinese character recognition and English word reading among 536 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners, second- and fifth-graders. The twelve tasks generally showed an increase in performance with grade level. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these four constituents of Chinese word reading revealed a dynamic pattern of children's latent linguistic or reading processing skills development: The best-fitting model of kindergartners' processing was one that included two broad constructs, broadly termed metalinguistic processing and orthographic processing. In contrast, second-graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to four distinct skills of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. Finally, the latent processing skills of the fifth-graders converged into phonological and orthographic processing. The contributions of each of these initially specified constructs, i.e., sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, to Chinese word reading varied across each separate grade in regression analyses. The sub-character processing construct was uniquely associated with kindergarten Chinese word reading only. In contrast, the morphological awareness construct was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in both second- and fifth-graders. The orthographic knowledge construct was uniquely associated with word reading across ail three grades. However, the phonological awareness construct was not uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in any of the groups of children, though it was uniquely associated with English word reading, even with Chinese character recognition skill statistically controlled. These findings