Research has established the link between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's reading development. However, the theoretical mechanisms underlying the association between them have yet to be fully understood. Moreover, few previous studies exploring the mechanisms tapped both first language (L1) and second language (L2) at the same time. In…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

Cognitive and linguistic components related to spelling and writing in English as a second language (ESL) and native-English speaking (EL1) third graders were examined. ESL and EL1 children performed similarly on rapid naming, phonological awareness (PA), verbal short-term and working memory, reading fluency, single-word spelling, text spelling,…

The present study examined the roles of different dimensions of syntactic skills in predicting reading comprehension within and across two languages with contrasting structural properties: Chinese and English. A total of 413 young Cantonese-English bilingual students in Hong Kong (202 first graders and 211 third graders) were tested on word order…

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English,…