Reading strategies of ethnic minority adolescent CSL learners: a think aloud study

Abstract

The case study examines the reading strategies of ethnic minority (EM) Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners (N=6) enrolled at a Hong Kong secondary school, with different levels of Chinese reading comprehension performance. Method: Participants of varied Chinese proficiency levels were given prior training in practicing thinking aloud, and then instructed to speak aloud their thought processes while completing a reading comprehension task similar in nature to the normal reading comprehension assessment tasks they had in the Chinese language subject. The collected data were analyzed with reference to a framework inspired by the self-reported reading strategies identified by Lau (2006) and the four levels of comprehension used in PIRLS (Mullis et al., 2006; Tse et al., 2006). Results: The results show that the more proficient learners tended to adopt an interactive reading model, while using a combination of various reading strategies including orthographic knowledge, prediction, self-correction, inferences, connotations, association, and induction for text decoding. The less proficient learners, with very limited orthographic knowledge while displaying obvious language anxiety and avoidance behavior, were inclined to adopt a bottom-up reading model instead, focusing only on the sub-sentential level of comprehension with minimal combination of other reading strategies making use of other contextual cues. Conclusions: The results suggest that purposeful combined use of the various reading strategies identified within the cohort, as well as combined use of top-down and bottom-up approaches, are highly likely to be instrumental in enabling EM CSL learners to achieve successful decoding of text meaning.