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Abstract
This study examined young Heritage Language (HL) learners' home literacy environment and its impact on HL word-knowledge development, focusing on a group of Chinese–English bilingual children learning to read in Chinese as a Heritage Language in the United States. A home literacy survey revealed that parents mostly used HL to talk to children, while learners preferred to use English or a mixture of English and HL to talk to their parents. Learners' HL reading practice at home showed a schoolwork orientation. There was a significant positive correlation between parents' language use and learners' HL vocabulary breadth; learners' schoolwork-related reading practice was also positively correlated with HL word knowledge. However, no significant relations were observed between independent and shared reading unrelated to schoolwork and learners' word knowledge. These findings are discussed in relation to the importance of school materials in HL literacy development and a possible threshold of frequency of schoolwork-unrelated reading that has to be passed for learners to be benefited.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the children of the Pittsburgh Chinese School for participating in this study. Our thanks also go to G. Richard Tucker for his comments on an earlier version of this article, and to three anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have helped improve this article. However, all flaws and errors are ours.
Notes
A reviewer was concerned about whether the word-knowledge measures were related to the materials being taught in the participants' CHL program. To clarify, the characters in the Radical Identification Task and the words in the Vocabulary Checklist Task were not specifically selected from the children's CHL textbooks. These two tasks, which were modeled on previous ones for monolingual Chinese children (see CitationLi, Anderson, Nagy, & Zhang, 2002; CitationKu & Anderson, 2003), were constructed to serve as measures of general character-structure knowledge and vocabulary breadth rather than textbook-specific knowledge.