At what age do kids in China start learning to read?

[trisha2766]

On an unrelated forum there was a discussion about teaching kids to read and apparently there is some research indicating that teaching kids to read too young can actually result in them being less skilled readers when they are a bit older. But this was all in English and phonetic languages in general.

So I was wondering at what age do kids in China start to learn to read? And do they generally learn some characters first before they start learning pinyin? Once you throw pinyin into the mix, then you could run into some of the same problems with any phonetic language I guess. Although Chinese just seems somehow different to me, even when considering pinyin. For one thing there is only x number of syllables possible in Chinese so phonics would seem to be less of an issue. I think the big point in phonics in languages like English is so kids are capable of sounding out new words that they don't know. Which really isn't an issue in Chinese.

But I'm not an early childhood learning expert. I'm just making guesses here. If anyone has information about how kids typically learn to read especially, and also to write - the age and sequence they learn in, etc. I would be interested in learning more. Also if anyone knows what early language learning researchers are recommending regarding languages that are not phonetic that would be appreciated.

[Meng Lelan]

From what I've observed among the children of friends, generally young children learn pinyin about age 4 and 5 along with a few basic characters. Then age 6 and 7 they begin formal reading instruction of characters with pinyin as support.

[LucyxLucy]

Chinese is my first language, and I remember picking up a lot of the words from picture books my parents used to read to me. I don't think they were trying to teach me to read on purpose, but I'm pretty sure I learned a lot of the simple words at that time just from the stories they read me; (this probably happens with English too, if parents read to their children a lot, they can probably read more that other children their age too) and this all happened at home so I was probably around 3 or 4.

And as Meng Lelan said above, I learnt to read some more when I was in preschool and kindergarden, but again, it was more for that the parents'll think we were being productive rather than acutal learning. I don't recall learning pinyin until I started grade 1, which was the very first thing we did in school, before learning any actual characters.

That was my 'path of learning' I guess, and I never had anything trouble with reading Chinese (when I stilled lived in China), so I'm not sure about the starting too early part. But keep in mind that this happened way back when I was still a kid, and from what I've heard, parents today are cramming so much into their children's heads so they are probably starting a lot earlier than I did.

[thekhanon]

I am going to have to strongly disagree with the assumption/theory that children who learn to read very early will have trouble reading later on. My mom started reading to all of my siblings and me before we were old enough to talk. When my older sister started talking, my mom began teaching her how to read. While my sister took her kindergarten reading placement test, I sat in the corner by myself and read the kindergarten level reading books. I was 3 or 3 and a half. Having parents who read to us on a regular basis, from an early age, and having older siblings to model ourselves after has resulted in advanced reading skills.

Just my $0.02.

[trisha2766]

Thanks for the replies!

Apparently there is a lot of research to indicate that learning to read too soon can cause problems because at least some kids aren't neurologically ready to read until they are older. Even Montessori and Waldorf schools don't teach kids to read until they are a bit older.

Having said that, I've been reading a lot lately about learning to read, different teaching methods and developmental stuff in kids,etc. and it seems as though it might be that some kids are being taught to read before they have developed pre-reading/reading readiness skills. If your mom read to you a lot chances are you developed those skills at an earlier age. But I suspect that some kids have not yet developed neurologically enough to learn to read until they are a bit older.

At the other forum and in that thread there were a lot of people who were early childhood teachers who were saying the same thing from their own experiences. They mentioned things like kids who could read wonderfully - the words anyway - but had like no comprehension of what they had read.

You know there are many people out there now using that 'your baby can read' stuff and similar things - that certainly isn't the way to go about it. I've heard that sometimes those kids babies only know the words they have 'learned' if they see them written the same way on the same flash cards - but in a different context they don't recognize the words at all.

It's all a very interesting subject, way more complicated - and controversial - than I would have guessed. Phonemic awareness. whole language versus a number of different phonics approaches, etc. Everything I read was discussing teaching English though - which doesn't have a lot of consistency between spelling and pronunciation. Which made me wonder how Chinese is taught and what kind of research concerning teaching kids to read Chinese has been done.

Here's a couple of things I read at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_awareness

I've been reading about this stuff in part for some articles I'm writing for one of my web sites but also for my daughter to know when and how to start teaching her to read, both English and Chinese.