The Impacts of Remedial Interventions on Learning Chinese for Low-Achieving First Graders

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a Chinese phonetic script, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao (ZYFH), influences low achievers in learning Chinese. In this quasi experimental design, 21 students were assigned to the experimental group, while the other 31 students were distributed to the control group. Two interventions were implemented throughout the school year: the remedial ZYFH intervention in the first semester and remedial Chinese-based intervention in the second semester. Data were gathered from the pre- and post-test results of subsets of ZYFH tests as well as comprehensive Chinese tests. The findings revealed that the remedial ZYFH intervention had an impact on promoting ZYFH abilities. Results also showed that Chinese reading could be improved by remedial Chinese-based intervention, but no reproducible effect of ZYFH-only intervention on Chinese reading was found. This suggests that the effect of ZYFH on learning to read Chinese was limited.