This article reports on the results of a research study which investigated the use of monolingual dictionaries by Hong Kong advanced Cantonese ESL learners in the production of target language sentences. Thirty-one English majors participated in a sentence completion task and a sentence construction task with and without the help of a monolingual dictionary. In the sentence completion task, a full Chinese context and a partial English context were given, whereas in the sentence construction task, only a few English prompts were given. Different self-reporting protocols, including introspective questionnaires, retrospective questionnaires and think-aloud recordings, and a post-task focus-group interview were conducted to tap into the participants' thinking processes during dictionary consultation. The results show that a monolingual dictionary is useful in helping learners produce target language sentences, yet learners encounter different kinds of consultation problems, some of which are related to their general use of dictionaries and others to the language in which their thinking processes are engaged. It is suggested that ESL learners use both monolingual and bilingualized dictionaries in their learning and that ESL teachers design dictionary skills training programs which take into account learners linguistic competence and actual consultation problems.
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http://lexikos.journals.ac.za/]

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge were uniquely associated with all three concurrently measured literacy skills, as well as longitudinal measures of specific literacy skills. Naming speed was also uniquely associated with concurrent word reading, as well as all three literacy skills longitudinally, even with their autoregressive effects controlled. Analyses of children's spelling mistakes indicated that 97% and 95% of all errors were either morpholexically or orthographically based at times 1 and 2, respectively. Morphologically based spelling errors were also uniquely associated with all three literacy skills across time. Findings underscore the importance of morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese literacy acquisition.
[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/10.1080/10888430903162910]