Behavioural self-regulation and its contribution to reading among Chinese poor readers

This study investigated to which behavioural self-regulation and language skills could discriminate Hong Kong Chinese poor from adequate readers. A total of 78 Chinese first graders with 39 poor readers and 39 adequate readers participated and they were matched on age, parents’ education levels and nonverbal intelligence (IQ). The two groups were tested on the measures of behavioral self-regulation (the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders; HTKS), vocabulary definition, phonological awareness, morphological construction, rapid digit naming, and sentence comprehension. Results showed that the poor readers performed less well than the adequate readers in all cognitive-linguistic and reading comprehension measures. Among these measures, the HTKS, morphological construction, and rapid digit naming showed the greatest power in discriminating poor and adequate readers. Self-regulation skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension after controlling for the effects of age and IQ. Together, these findings highlight the potential importance of the process of learning to read in Chinese for shaping one’s self-regulation skills. Copyright © 2015 Dyslexia Association of Singapore.