Teaching English Reading in the Chinese-Speaking World: Building Strategies

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.

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.