Effect of quality of teacher-child conversation on Hong Kong K1 children's preliteracy skills /

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Student Theses

2020

Ng, Lai Yi

Hong Kong : The Education University of Hong Kong

Thesis

Objectives: The present study investigated 1) whether K1 children experiencing higher quality teacher-child conversation at preschool would achieve significantly better in oral language, morphological awareness and phonological awareness after statistically controlling their non-verbal reasoning ability, socio-economic status, home literacy environment and the physical literacy environment of their preschool, 2) whether oral language, morphological awareness and phonological awareness could explain certain variance of children's word reading as earlier as at when they were in K1. Methods: Sixty K1 children from 6 local kindergartens participated in the study. Half of them came from preschools that scored low in quality of teacher-child conversation while the other half came from preschools that scored moderate. Their oral language, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, word reading and non-verbal reasoning ability were assessed through online survey. Their parents filled out an online questionnaire about their socioeconomic status and home literacy environment. Principal investigator visited each preschool once and rated their physical literacy environment. Results: Results showed that 1) there was a robust effect of quality of teacher-child conversation on children's performance in oral language, morphological awareness, phonological awareness and word reading, 2) oral language, morphological awareness and phonological awareness significantly correlated with word reading, but the effect of phonological awareness became non-significant when it entered the multiple regression model following oral language and morphological awareness. Conclusion: Findings in this study suggest that implementation of high-quality teacher-child conversation within preschool programs is essential to prepare young children for learning to read, more conversational strategies training is thereby needed for pre-service and in-service preschool educators in Hong Kong. Findings also suggest that at early stage of language acquisition (i.e. K1), oral language and morphological awareness may override the role of phonological awareness in predicting reading given the high covariance among them when they were entered in the same model. Therefore, practitioners can devote more efforts in promoting children's oral language and morphological awareness when they are in K1

LG51.H43 MSS(Psy) 2020eb Ngly

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/zP5QyaoV