The impact of SES, home environment, executive functioning and metalinguistic skills on academic achievement in Chinese children

The present study examined the link between socioeconomic status (SES), home environment, executive functions (EF), metalinguistic skills and academic achievement in preschool children. One hundred ninety-nine Hong Kong Chinese-speaking children at age of 4 from low- and mid-SES backgrounds were tested on the measures of inhibitory control, working memory (WM), visual-spatial relationship, parent-child verbal interaction, phonological awareness (PA), word recognition, and mathematics. Findings showed that the low-SES children had lower scores on most of the measures than their middle-SES counterparts except word recognition and inhibitory control. Regressions also revealed that PA uniquely predicted word recognition and mathematics for both SES groups after controlling for age, SES, and other variables. Furthermore, EF as a combination of inhibitory control and WM significantly accounted for unique variable in mathematics only. These findings highlight the importance of SES, executive functioning and metalinguistic skills for learning to read Chinese language.