Gross Motor Proficiency and Reading Abilities Among Chinese Primary School Students

The relation between motor skills and reading performance among young children has been explored in existing studies, but few of them focused on gross motor skills, and these demonstrated inconsistent findings. The current study aimed to examine the relationship between gross motor proficiency and reading abilities among Chinese primary school students (N = 107, mean age = 8.70 years). Participants completed measures of a non-verbal intelligence test, a gross motor proficiency test, and reading ability tests that assess their Chinese phonological awareness, Chinese morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. The results of correlational and regression analyses revealed a weak association between gross motor level and each component of reading achievement. Meanwhile, the correlation between gross motor proficiency and morphological awareness, as well as between gross motor proficiency and reading comprehension, did not reach statistical significance. In conclusion, the present study justified the negligible predictive power of gross motor proficiency on reading abilities among Chinese young students.