Literacy skills in China

My friend Ke Dan's 5 year old twins can read. And they can read in Chinese way better than I can. They point out signs and pick up papers laying about just to see when they say. Wang P tells me her 8 year old daughter loves reading and so do all of her classmates at school. She's already reading classic novels translated into Chinese.

This raises a lot of questions. Are Chinese children socially conditioned to love reading? Of course, Wang P and her husband are avid readers and Ke Dan is a teacher. These type of parents will produce literate children, no doubt. I'm surprised at the strength of the children's reading ability--it's hard to compare between Chinese and English, especially because there's no way I can measure comprehension, accuracy, fluency and the like, but it APPEARS that these children are fairly fluent readers with a high level of comprehension.

Reading in English, on the other hand, appears to be quite weak. When I first arrived I assumed that because Chinese are highly literate, that they don't need to teach explicit reading skills in English. After all, we focus so much on literacy in elementary classes in the US, but in China, the students are learning English as a Foreign Language. But I'm realizing this couldn't be more wrong and language is language, whether it be 'second' or 'foreign'.

From what I've observed and also found in research (Tinker Sachs and Mahon) conducted in Hong Kong, students are relying on ONE strategy when they read--memorization. This seems to be a huge national talent. When it comes to storing information in the brain, we can't hold a candle to the Chinese. If you think about it, we haven't been asked to memorize much at all (comparatively). And the nature of the Chinese language requires a lot of memorization. Some of the characters do give you a clue as to how to pronounce it but overall, you have to learn the pronunciation and the meaning with little help from the character.

This strategy of memorization does seem to automatically transfer to English, and it can work--up until the point at which the student encounters an unfamiliar word. In Tinker Sachs and Mahon's research, most students did not attempt to pronounce any letters of a new word and instead skipped it altogether. Too many unfamiliar words and comprehension was lost. Older students occasionally attempted new words, but again, comprehension was low overall.

One possible area of research would be to study how students are taught to read in Chinese. Once we know what strategies students are using, then we could explicitly teach how to use them in English.

Another idea would be to take a closer look at how reading is taught in EFL classes at the primary level. I already have a good idea but no data. I know a teacher who is worried that teaching her students the letters and sounds in English will confuse her first graders because they are currently learning PINYIN (phonetic spelling of Chinese words using roman letters, some with very different names and corresponding sounds than we use in English).

The textbooks don't help really. They are supposedly 'orally' focused though I haven't witnessed students speaking much. The pictures and dialogues are good at introducing vocabulary but as the texts ARE the state-mandated curriculum, most teachers go from page to page each day, following the text exactly not daring to stray to far away.

There is research out there that supports teaching reading and writing from the very beginning, even though the oral language isn't there. This is the belief in my department at home and it works. Though I have to admit, the students have the benefit of constant exposure to English all day long. Chinese students don't have this opportunity.

So these are my thoughts for now. Next step is to pull from this mess one precise question and make a plan for research. Any and all input is welcome!