Understanding the English Reading Comprehension of Chinese University Students Based on the Simple View of Reading

Abstract

This study examined the role of word-level reading skills (decoding) and language comprehension in English as a second language reading comprehension. A total of 167 Chinese second-year undergraduates participated in the study, and 44 poor readers and 47 typical readers were screened and compared for their performance on tests of English reading and reading-related cognitive skills. The results showed that (1) poor readers scored significantly lower than typical readers in word reading and listening comprehension, but they were comparable in terms of phoneme segmentation, rapid letter naming and reading fluency; (2) word reading and listening comprehension accounted for 42% of the variance in reading comprehension, with independent contributions in regression analysis; and (3) word reading was significantly correlated with phonological knowledge and rapid letter naming for university students. Therefore, variations in the English reading of Chinese university students could be explained by the framework of the simple view of reading (SVR) model, and implications of the study are considered.

Keywords:

• English as a second language
• phonological processing skills
• reading difficulty
• simple view of reading
• university students

Ethical approval

All procedures were approved by the Academic Ethics Committee of Nanjing Normal University of Special Education.

Authors’ contributions

Study design, material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Qinfang Xu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by all authors and they commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

Qinfang Xu declares that she has no conflict of interest; Zhigang Zhang declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Humanities & Social Science Program of Ministry of Education in China (No. 18YJA190018).