A meta-analysis on the Simple View of Reading in Chinese: Effects of grade and dialect at different levels of decoding and linguistic comprehension

Abstract

Purpose: The present study of meta-analysis examined the adequacy of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in explaining reading comprehension in Chinese. Effects of several moderators, including grade level, decoding subskills, linguistic comprehension (LC) subskills, reading comprehension (RC) test format, and dialect, were tested. Method: A total of 1887 publication records related to the SVR with Chinese readers were initially identified from various databases from 1990 to 2017. Through title screening (n=1373), abstract screening (n=715), and full-text article assessment (n=336), 40 articles were included in the final analyses with 63 sample groups, and 9220 participants (aged 6 to 18 years). Results: The overall mean correlation between decoding and RC (.55) was higher than that between LC and RC (.41). Significant grade differences (Grade 1-2 vs. Grade 3 or above) were found for correlation between decoding and RC with stronger correlation in lower than in higher grades. The drop in correlation with RC across grade was higher for decoding fluency (from .53 to .29) than that for decoding accuracy (from .58 to .43). As for the effect of dialect, LC at the vocabulary level had a stronger correlation with RC in Mandarin than in Cantonese speakers. Conclusion: The present findings show that, like readers of English, an opaque orthography, decoding accuracy is an essential skill for reading and understanding Chinese text, and it remains influential for reading comprehension from first grade onward. Chinese decoding fluency also plays an important role in reading comprehension in early grades, in a way similar to readers of transparent orthographies.