A Socio-psycholinguistic Study on L2 Chinese Readers' Behavior While Reading Orally

摘要

In this study, I explore the nature of Chinese reading in relation to Ken Goodman's transactional socio-psycholinguistic model and theory of reading (Goodman, 1996, 2004). The primary purposes of this study are (1) to establish a sound instrument for Chinese miscue studies, (2) to use this instrument to explore the Chinese reading process by means of miscue analysis, and (3) to provide a knowledge base of the nature of Chinese reading for professionals to make informed and appropriate choices in their teaching of reading and language.The subjects in this study are twelve native English speakers enrolled in a second year Chinese language course at the University of Arizona. To facilitate comparison, all the readers read the same Chinese story Jinfutou (A Gold Axe) that they had never read before. Following Reading Miscue Inventory procedures (Goodman, Watson, and Burke, 2005), each tape-recorded data collection session included an interview, an uninterrupted reading of the story, a retelling, and a follow-up discussion.By coding a total of 643 oral reading miscues generated by the readers in this study, I develop the Chinese Taxonomy of Reading Miscues building on the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues (Goodman & Burke, 1973). I then examine the oral reading of the Chinese text by the readers through the Chinese Taxonomy. The analyses yield results which show that the miscue patterns produced by the L2 Chinese readers are strikingly similar to the miscue patterns produced by the readers in miscue studies of English and other languages. This demonstrates that readers of all writing systems make use of cues from graphophonic / graphomorphemic, lexico-grammar, and semantic levels to get to meaning, regardless of the differences in writing systems. In addition, readers of Chinese do not read character by character linearly; in order to construct meaning they make use of the three cueing systems, their existing linguistic and conceptual schemata, and a variety of reading strategies. The analyses also show that there are language-specific effects on the use of reading strategies and the selection of language cues in reading Chinese. For instance, readers of Chinese rely more strongly on the syntactic and semantic cues than on the graphic and phonemic cues, as required by the "highly-semantic" characteristic of the Chinese writing system.