Abstract
There are over 19 million left-behind children aged 6 to 11 years in rural China (All-China Women’s Federation, 2013), and many of them have significantly poor reading comprehension ability (Xiaofeng, Wenhui and Aibao, 2018), which has a negative effect on their development of academic achievement and may result in school dropout (Daniel et al., 2006; Morgan et al., 2008; Nation et al., 2010). Thus, a comprehensive understanding of the skills that children need to understand what they read is necessary. In the present study, we selected 80 Chinese children (including the left-behind and the parented) from 5 primary schools in rural areas of Fanxian City in Henan province. We measured their socioeconomic status, home literacy environment, learning motivation and reading comprehension. We also tested their cognitive-linguistic skills including non-verbal intelligence, character recognition, vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, working memory, morphological awareness and syntactic awareness. We hypothesized that parents’ education and home reading activities scores significantly correlated with children’s with students’ reading performance. Left-behind children might have poor performance in both cognitive and linguistic-tasks compared to control group. Copyright © 2020 ARWA.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - Sept 2020 |
Event | The 4th Annual Conference for the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia - Duration: 24 Sept 2020 → 25 Sept 2020 |
Conference
Conference | The 4th Annual Conference for the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia |
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Abbreviated title | ARWA 2020 |
Period | 24/09/20 → 25/09/20 |
Citation
Yu, L., & Tong, X. (2020, September). Left-behind children’s reading comprehension difficulty: The roles of cognitive-linguistic skills, family learning environment and learning motivation [Zoom]. Paper presented at the 4th Annual Conference for the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia (ARWA 2020), Beijing, China.Keywords
- Reading comprehension difficulty
- Left-behind children
- Cognitive-linguistic skills