Chinese Students Learning English as a Second Language

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study has been competently conducted, and reported with sufficient clarity. The study is helpfully framed with information that helps to contextualise it for readers outside the Chinese context. Some additional imporvement would be possible by connecting the study more closely to international discourses about langauge education - why is this an important problem to study, what implications might it have for readers ourside the context? A trivial issue that needs correcting nevertheless: in line 76 there appears to be placeholder text for missing information. 

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. We have added additional sections to connect the study to international discourses about language education and have removed the error in line 76.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. The abstract should include 2-3  introductory sentences elaborating major variables of the study and the problem; moreover, practical implications should be added to the end of abstract in 1-2 sentences. In addition, more information related to the methodology such as study design, sample size, sampling and data analysis procedures should be briefly introduced.

2. In the participants section, the author/s should add more information about the selection criteria and sampling procedures followed to choose a specific number of the participants. Moreover, design of the study should be, first, elaborated before discussing the participants.

3. In the measurement section, the author/s should discuss validity and reliability of the instruments. They should clarify if the instruments are self-developed or adopted/adapted from another source. If adopted, the reference should be provided. Moreover, scoring system and number of items and aspects evaluated by the items in instruments should be clearly and thoroughly discussed.

4. When reporting the results, effect size should be also presented and discussed. Effect size for t-test is investigated through Cohen's d.

5. There is no in-depth discussion section. It is mostly similar to the summary of findings and conclusion section. Discussion section should use critical thinking to compare and contrast the obtained result with the findings by other relevant/similar studies condcuted by other researchers. Then, the possible reasons for the similarities and differences should be elaborated. Finally, potential reasons for the current study results should be provided.

6. References have some inconsistencies. Please double check to use the latest reference style as recommended by the journal,

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are some minor problems in language. Please proofread it carefully.

Author Response

1. Thank you for the suggestion. We have added in an introductory sentence, however we have decided not to add anything in additional to that, as it is already over the suggested word maximum for the abstract.
2. We have added in more information about the selection criteria to the Methods section regarding the participants with dyslexia. This research was part of a larger study with information relating to the sampling being discussed in a different journal article that is currently in press for the Annals of Dyslexia.
3. We have added in references, where appropriate, to reflect which measures were adapted from previous studies. We have also clarified item number and scoring of items for each of the measures. Validity and reliability are discussed elsewhere, in a journal article that is currently in press for the Annals of Dyslexia. The paper discusses how to make these tasks equivalent across Chinese cities with a focus on validity and reliability.
4. We have added in the effect size for the t-test and presented this in the results section.
5. We have added more to the discussion section to address this concern.
6. We have double checked the references to ensure they are in the format recommended by the journal.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I would like to express my appreciation for the significance of your research topic in developing cross-linguistic studies. With the prevalence of bilingualism and even multilingualism worldwide, it is crucial to comprehend the impact of the languages one acquires for speaking and reading. I have a few suggestions and comments I hope that adding these would help in reshaping the paper in a better way.

1.     I would remove the term “reading” from the keywords under the abstract and keep “literacy development.” I would also add “Pinyin” to your list of keywords. 

2.     Under the introduction, lines 22 – 23, it is unclear whether you are talking about phonological awareness in Pinyin or English: “Our measures of phonological skill included both phonological awareness and Pinyin knowledge.” Please clarify that. 

3.     Lines 48 – 50, “In the present study, we expanded our exploration of the association of Pinyin to English word reading in Chinese children from Beijing, where Pinyin is commonly used, to Hong Kong, where Pinyin is less commonly used.” please rephrase or clarify. They are a little confusing. 

4.     Please add a paragraph titled “Similarities among Pinyin spelling and English spellings” in the Introduction. Although you mentioned briefly that there are some similarities in the alphabet your non-Chinese readers might want to know more to what extent these similarities exist.

5.     Line 76 has an extra “in.” Please fix this typo. 

6.     There's an insufficient explanation for why one should expect Chinese morphology to transfer to English word reading. Adding a section that covers Chinese morphology and its relation to English word reading could help readers understand these expectations better.

7.     I would like you to add a brief section on what was/were your research questions and/or hypotheses alternatively. 

8.     Please add a brief section on the Chinese education system in the two locations you gathered data from, including details such as when English is introduced in classrooms and how it is taught.

9.     Line 177, please change the word “run” to “conducted.”

10.  In the result section, please add a rationale for providing descriptive statistics and correlational analyses. 

11.  Table 1, first row for both parts of the table, is it English silent word reading? Please specify. 

12.  I don’t understand the reasoning behind including Dyslexia as a possible predictor of English word reading in the regression analysis. Please explain. 

13.  It seems like the paper's results section is unclear to the authors. It would have been helpful if research questions or hypotheses were included earlier in the paper to provide direction, reasoning and expectations of the analyses. Additionally, Dyslexia was not mentioned until the participants’ information was added, and it would be useful to have a section explaining when children are tested for dyslexia in China. Given that many students with dyslexia were included in both groups, adding a section on the common outcomes of dyslexic children in Chinese, Cantonese and/or Mandarin would help to understand the differences. This may also help to explain why Dyslexia was included as a separate predictor of English word reading. 

14.  The authors have provided a brief discussion that lacks explanations of their findings and only seems to interpret the result section in the discussion section. A complete rewrite of this paper is required due to a very poor organization in the Results and Discussion sections.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

N/A

Author Response

1. We have kept “literacy development” and we have also added “Pinyin” to our list of keywords. We have decided to keep “reading development” in the keywords as we want the keywords to be accessible to a wide audience.
2. We have clarified that we are talking about phonological awareness in Chinese.
3. We have rephrased lines 48-50 to clarify.
4. We have added a paragraph titled “Similarities among Pinyin spelling and English spellings” in the Introduction.
5. We have fixed this typo.
6. We have added a section that covers Chinese morphology and its relation to English word reading.
7. We have added a brief description of our hypotheses in the “Present study” section.
8. We have added a brief section on the Chinese education system in the two locations we gathered data from.
9. We have changed the wording in line 177.
10. We have provided descriptive statistics and correlational analyses in the result section to give readers a more robust overview of the mean scores and standard deviations of the measures in both Hong Kong and Beijing and to show the significant correlations of the cognitive-linguistic measures to English word reading.
11. We have specified that the measure is Average of English Silent Word Reading. This has been fixed in Table 2 as well.
12. This research was part of a larger study that focused partly on those with and without dyslexia. We wanted to incorporate the understanding that it might be possible that status of dyslexia might matter, but ultimately this was not our finding. However, we kept it in the model as this was something we did examine.
13. We have added in a section regarding dyslexia in Chinese children earlier in the paper to explain why it was included as a separate predictor of English word reading.
14. Thank you for your suggestions. We have added several suggested sections in the introduction section and expanded our ideas in the discussion. This has allowed us to shape the paper in a more deliberate way allowing for the focus to flow more naturally throughout.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author suggested that validity and reliability was evaluated in another study which is in press right now. However, it cannot garantee the validity and elianility, so the author should clarify it here without referring to another study.

Author Response

Thank you for your suggestion. We have included reliability for the measures in the Methods section and addressed this in the discussion. We believe the measures used in the current study are valid as they have been used in previous research to assess the same cognitive-linguistic skills assessed in our study. Further, all measures in Beijing and Hong Kong were significantly correlated with the measure of English Word Reading (see Table 1 for these correlations).

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you so much for incorporating my suggestions and comments. I have a few more things I would like you to take care of. 

1. You added a line at the beginning of your abstract suggesting that Chinese literacy learning depends on English literacy skills but later said English is your population's L2. I am confused. Please provide clear and sufficient support for what you have claimed. What you said in V2.0 suggests English and Chinese literacy learning happens simultaneously in both school systems. Is that right? Please clarify all of this in your next submission. 

The rest looks good to me. 

Thank you once again!

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. We have rephrased the first sentence in the abstract for clarity. We suggest that the way Chinese literacy is taught in the two cities may impact which skills children in these cities use when learning English later in school. English is the L2 for participants in this study, Chinese is the L1.