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Teaching English Reading in the Chinese-Speaking World

Building Strategies Across Scripts

  • Textbook
  • © 2016

Overview

Authors:
  1. Clay Williams

    1. Akita International University, Akita, Japan

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  • Compares educational practices and philosophies in Chinese and English-speaking classrooms
  • Presents psychometric testing of adult reading strategy defaults in Chinese and English-speaking populations
  • Defines potential word-identification problems stemming from L1 interference, common to Chinese learners of English
  • Proposes a new educational framework for teaching beginning literacy skills across different scripts

Part of the book series: Springer Texts in Education (SPTE)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introductions to Literacy

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 1-18

  3. The Chinese Language

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 19-38

  4. Chinese Elementary Education

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 39-58

  5. English Education in the Chinese Classroom

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 59-79

  6. Chinese on the Brain

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 81-107

  7. Default Reading Strategies: English and Chinese

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 109-139

  8. Reading Against the Stream: Using the Wrong Strategies to Acquire L2 Literacy

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 141-159

  9. A Better Way: Teaching English from the Ground Up

    • Clay Williams
    Pages 161-185
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Keywords

About this book

This book investigates inherent, structural differences in the Chinese and English writing systems which predispose learners from childhood to develop specific literacy-learning strategies, which can impair later efforts at learning foreign language literacy if the foreign language script varies significantly from the native language script. It compares educational practices and philosophies in Chinese and English-speaking classrooms, and examines the psychological underpinnings of these literacy learning strategies. This book presents psychometric testing of adult reading strategy defaults and examines case study data, revealing that Chinese students are susceptible to misapplying Chinese character-level processing strategies to English word identification tasks, which decreases reading efficiency, and ultimately can lead to learning failure. Finally, a new educational framework is proposed for teaching beginning language-specific word identification and literacy-learning skills to learners whose first language script varies significantly from that of the target language.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Akita International University, Akita, Japan

    Clay Williams

About the author

Clay H. Williams is an associate professor in the graduate-level English Language Teaching Practices department of Akita International University (in northern Japan), where he teaches courses on linguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and research methods. His primary research interests include cross-script effects on L2 literacy development with special emphasis on Chinese-English and Japanese-English literacy learning skills, lexical access in non-alphabetic script reading, and adapting L2 teaching methodologies to East Asian classroom contexts. He received a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) from the University of Arizona. Over the course of his career, he has taught a wide range of students, from two-year-olds to seventy-year-olds, and practically everything in between, in five countries and three continents.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Teaching English Reading in the Chinese-Speaking World

  • Book Subtitle: Building Strategies Across Scripts

  • Authors: Clay Williams

  • Series Title: Springer Texts in Education

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0643-2

  • Publisher: Springer Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Education, Education (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-981-10-0641-8Published: 15 April 2016

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-10-0643-2Published: 07 April 2016

  • Series ISSN: 2366-7672

  • Series E-ISSN: 2366-7680

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIV, 185

  • Number of Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Language Education

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