Dilemmas and Strategies for Reading Unfamiliar Words Among Children Learning English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The present study investigates common word reading dilemmas across 3 word types among children learning English as a foreign language (EFL). It also examines the effectiveness of a new word reading strategy, perceptual diacritics, for facilitating EFL children’s word reading dilemmas through an experimental design in which the experimental group received training in word reading facilitated by perceptual diacritics. We recruited 46 5th graders who spoke Chinese as their primary language from an urban district primary school. Results indicated that word type strongly influenced the word reading performance of the EFL children. After the intervention, the experimental group improved equivalently across the 3 word types, whereas the control group still struggled with the 2 higher level word types. The findings imply that EFL children have common difficulties with phonological recoding of words with less predictable orthographic patterns. With the help of the new strategy, EFL children may better decode these inconsistent patterns phonologically.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments from the editors and three anonymous reviewers, whose feedback and suggestions on an earlier version of this work greatly improved the quality of this article. All remaining errors are ours. We are also grateful to the participating teachers and students at Lilin Elementary school for their assistance during the study.