Disparities in High-Level Reading Skills Between Chinese Migrant and Urban Children: The Roles of Migrant Status, Home Literacy Environment, and Parental Expectations

How to bridge the gap between reading skills of rural-to-urban migrant (RUM) children and urban-resident (UR) children has long been a big challenge in the field of language and family education research. However, very few studies have addressed this issue with a focus on high-level reading skills and their association with home literacy environment (HLE) and parental expectations (PE).
Purpose: Adopting a battery of reading comprehension and meta-comprehension (monitoring and control) tasks, this study aims to investigate the high-level reading disparity between RUM and UR children. Additionally, it intends to examine the influence of migrant status on high-level reading skills and further explore the function of HLE and PE as potential mediators.
Method: A total of 311 Chinese children (Mage=98.8 months, SDage =7.5; 163 RUM and 148 UR) and their parents were randomly selected as the participants. Independent T-test and Structural Equation Modelling were employed for data analysis.
Results: The results revealed that UR children significantly outperformed RUM group on reading comprehension and comprehension control task; in addition, PE and HLE played a mediating role between migrant status and high-level reading skills. Crucially, PE can be counterproductive on high-level reading skills if high expectations were simply held without creating a supportive HLE.
Conclusion: The findings indicate that the association between migrant status and children’s high-level reading skills was fully mediated by home literacy environment and parental expectations. These results have valuable theoretical and practical implications for language and family education targeting on migrant population.