LEARNING TO READ CHINESE: THE ROLE OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN A PHONETICALLY OPAQUE SCRIPT

A positive relationship of phonological awareness and reading alphabetic writings is well documented. Chinese does not have the transparent speech-script correspondence as the alphabets do. We review several studies carried out in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China on the effect of phonological awareness on reading Chinese. Data reveal that almost all subjects were aware of speech sound at the syl-labic level. Smaller than syllabic unit speech sound awareness may require some form of instruction in phonetic aids. Yet it is not a must in order to learn to read Chinese. The finding is discussed in relation to the structure of Chinese characters that provide phonetic cues and help phonological coding when reading characters. 1. Phonological awareness and reading In western literature concerning the acquisition of reading, the main focus is di-rected to decoding single words and more specifically, phonological awareness (Adams 1991). A positive relation between phonological awareness and reading ability has been established (I. Liberman, Shankweiler, & A. Liberman 1989). Phonological awareness refers to an explicit mental representation of phonological information in processing oral and written language. In English, phonological awareness has been operationalized as the ability to discriminate phonemes. For example, segmenting /cat / into /k/-/ae/-/t/. Most of the alphabetic script and speech correspondence is transparent, each sound is represented by a letter, as in cat. To segment speech sounds, there are Grapheme-Phoneme conver-sion (G-P-C) rules to follow. It would be very natural and easy then, for the al-phabetic readers to perform the phoneme segmentation tasks. However, this is not the case. In alphabetic research, of particular interest is the data regarding the explicit analysis capacities of non-readers — whether the preschool children, disadvan-taged readers, or adult illiterates often perform less well to readers. For example