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[Talk 3]Early Identification and Intervention of Reading and Writing Difficulties in Chinese Young Children

Speaker: Dr. YIN, Li

Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University. Dr. Yin got her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2005), M.A. in Linguistics (1997) and B.A. in English Language and Literature (1994) at Jilin University, China. Dr. Yin’s research interests is in early literacy development and early diagnosis of reading and writing difficulties, particularly in Chinese-speaking children. Dr. Yin has been leading two National Natural Science Foundation of China projects and her work was published in SSCI journals with good impact factors such as Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Development, etc.

Abstract:

Reading and writing are critical for children’s development. One out of five school-age children, however, struggle with learning to read or write because of a biologically based learning disability. Such difficulties may persist through the elementary grades into adolescence and even into adulthood, severely handicapping individual’s academic, psychological, and social growth. Although intervention cannot change the genes that one inherits at conception that affect biological vulnerability, appropriate instruction can change gene expression and improve the affected individuals’ performance level. In Mainland China, basic research on written language disabilities has started and little, if any, work has been done to apply research to clinical and educational practices. This is regrettable given that Mainland China has the largest population of children in the world and about 8% of them (around 19.4 million) may suffer from developmental reading disability.

This talk introduces how Chinese children in Mainland China develop early knowledge about written Chinese and how this relates to future literacy. In recent years, Dr. Yin and her colleagues found that Chinese kindergarteners develop knowledge about the formal characteristics of writing early. From age 2, Chinese children can produce distinctions between writing and drawing in conventional ways appreciated by adults, reflecting their cross-domain knowledge about writing; from age 3, they can produce important visual distinctions between name writing and non-name single character writing, indicating their within-domain knowledge about different types of writing. Sensitivity to the structural and phonetic regularities in Chinese appeared in 4-year-olds, and sensitivity to radical positions emerged in 5-year-olds. Such sensitivities explained unique variance in Chinese word reading and writing one year later, with age and nonverbal IQ statistically controlled. They found that even in Chinese where written units correspond to syllables, learning about how writing appears visually develops earlier than learning that writing corresponds to linguistic units. From perspective of statistical learning, Dr. Yin’s work sheds important light on early literacy development and early diagnosis of reading and writing difficulties in Chinese young children.

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