Poster #51 - Chinese Preschool Writing: Factor Structure and Association with Early Literacy Skills

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Purpose: Early writing is an important part of children’s early literacy skills that develop in Preschool. In the past two decades, emergent literacy research has deepened the understanding of young children’s early writing development in terms of the theoretical and conceptual models to capture children’s early writing process (Berninger & Swanson, 1994; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Puranik & Lonigan, 2014) and the associations among children’s early literacy and writing skills (Puranik et al., 2011). However, most of these studies were established to delineate early writing in alphabetic language systems, and most of them were in English (Share, 2008; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). As there are some fundamental differences across different orthographies (Treiman & Kessler, 2014), whether the theoretical and empirical evidence holds for a non-alphabetic language, such as Chinese, needs further exploration. This study explores the dimensionality of Chinese preschoolers’ writing. Further, it examines the associations among Chinese children’s early literacy and writing skills.
Method: A total of 155 children were recruited from 16 preschool classrooms located in Baoding, China. Children were assessed at the middle of the spring semester on three writing measures: name writing, Chinese character writing, and story writing. Also, three early literacy skills were assessed: Pinyin knowledge, phonological awareness, and visual-spatial knowledge.
Two Confirmatory factor analysis (one vs. two latent factors) were conducted to examine the conceptual model fit of Chinese early writing skill (see Table 1). A SEM model was conducted to examine the associations among Chinese early literacy and writing skills (see Figure 2).
Conclusions: Similar to the simple view of writing in English context, children’s early writing consists of two distinct dimensions, which are the transcription and composing skills. However, unlike English, the correlation between transcription and composing dimensions is not significant in the Chinese language context. Spatial knowledge, which is a unique reading skill for decoding Chinese characters and sentences, is significantly associated with transcription skills (McBride et al., 2003). Pinyin is also critical to children’s transcription skills (Zhang et al., 2019). Other decoding skills that are important to early writing in the English language context, such as phonological awareness, did not show significant associations with Chinese early writing.

Authors

• Chenyi Zhang, Georgia State University

• Xiao Zhang, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author

• Gary E Bingham, Georgia State University

• Liying Zhang, Hebei University