Reading in Asian Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

The major Asian languages are becoming increasingly important in business, travel, and academia. Although they share a common history, outside of Asia there is little understanding of how character-based writing systems work for their users and why these systems have endured. At the same time, there is little research that attempts to relate modern views of the nature of the reading process to these languages. This book offers a comprehensive view of constructing meaning through reading and argues that there is a single process of making sense of written language regardless of the orthography. The authors of Reading in Asian Languagesshare a high level of knowledge about language and literacy, and the majority of them are native speakers of the languages they are writing about. In this volume, they combine their insights as users of character-based writing with their scientific knowledge to create a book that is unique in its perspective and bound to stimulate innovation in both research and instruction on this topic.