Pilot project below looked but did not see.
This is a continuation of my post yesterday. LINK
This is an important topic and I have highlighted sentences I want to elaborate on in my next post.
Maggie Chiang:
Parents specifically see that their children are struggling in school and China is as we know overpopulated, we have so many people in China and Chinese people view themselves in a way as resources if you cannot do one job there are 400 people lined up to take over right. So, if you're not achieving the best grade you're cast out and parents are anxious they see a smart child but this child cannot succeed or cannot at least Express their Intelligence in academics.
My thoughts:
Yes, many of the smart kids in China cannot express their intelligence in academics. As Maggie pointed out, if you cannot achieve the best grades you are cast out.
A pilot study was done by Shaowei Ma, Xiumei Zhang, Hunter Hatfield, and Wen-Hua Wei in, 2020.
In this pilot study, they ascertained the feasibility of using Pinyin reading to screen cohorts of early schoolers for individuals at risk of Reading Disorders (RD).
They showed that Pinyin reading was mainly determined by phonological awareness, was well developed in Grade 1, and was the top predictor of reading comprehension.
They concluded that Pinyin is an effective proxy for early screening for Mandarin-speaking children at risk of RD.
Pinyin, an alphabetic coding system mapping Mandarin sounds to characters, is important to develop oral language skills and is a promising tool for early screening for RD.
Further, students who performed poorly in Pinyin reading tended to perform poorly in future reading comprehension tests.
Given these advantages, Pinyin can be taught informally to kindergartners as young as 3 years old and appears to be a good predictor of future Chinese reading performance.
Previous evidence showed that poor readers in higher grades (e.g. Grade 4) suffer more from Pinyin reading difficulties than normal readers (Yin and Weekes, 2003; Ding et al., 2015).
Pinyin is the official instruction language in mainland China, where children normally start primary school around 7 years old and receive full Pinyin training before learning to read Chinese characters. Pinyin teaching normally takes the first 12 weeks to cover onsets, rhymes, lexical tones, and spelling rules. The Pinyin phonetic symbols are continuously presented alongside Chinese characters in textbooks until Grade 3, and are provided only when new characters are introduced.
Pinyin reading
A novel measure where children were asked to read out 50 one-syllable and 25 two-syllable words all in Pinyin scripts and scored for each syllable pronounced correctly. The maximum score is 75.
Can Pinyin early screening be implemented at the preschool stage? The answer is probably yes given the reasons above and the successful examples of English early screening in the United Kingdom and United States, each also relying heavily on PA (Snowling, 2013; Shepley and Grisham-Brown, 2019).
Although only a small sample of an ordinary school in China was used in this pilot study, the observed rates of students at risk of RD (i.e. 8 and 6% in Grades 1 and 2, respectively, Table 2) however, are in line with the hypothesis that dyslexia could be less prevalent in Mandarin-speaking communities as reported previously (Dai et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2016; Zhao et al., 2016) than in Hong Kong (9.7%) (Chan et al., 2007) where Pinyin is not used in Chinese teaching.
Nonetheless, cautions are recommended when interpreting the results of this pilot study which is limited by small samples and hypothesized statistical analyses without actual diagnosis of RD in any samples.
The screening tests identified less than 15% of students as being at risk for RD, which is a strong first step in identifying those in need of early intervention and full assessment. Furthermore, implementation of the Pinyin screening is convenient and cost-effective given Pinyin training is compulsory for every new primary school student in mainland China. Ideally, such implementations could happen immediately after the Pinyin teaching in order to maximize the window of effective interventions under the current teaching system.
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