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This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.

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The present study aimed at identifying core components of reading instruction in Chinese within the framework of the tiered intervention model. A curriculum with four teaching components of cognitive-linguistic skills was implemented in a Program school for three years since Grade 1. The findings showed that the Tier 1 intervention was effective in enhancing the literacy and cognitive-linguistic skills of children in the Program school. The positive effects were maintained at the end of Grade 2. Progress in both word-level and text-level cognitive-linguistic skills predicted significantly progress in reading comprehension. Based on the present findings, the four core reading components in Chinese were proposedoral language, morphological awareness, orthographic skills, and syntactic skills. Comparing the Big Five in English and the four core components in Chinese reflects different cognitive demands for reading diverse orthographies.