The primary objective of this study was to compare the syntactic complexity of informational texts produced by fifth-grade students (a) with and without language impairment and (b) with and without native English-speaking proficiency on a curriculum-based reading and writing task. Expository writing samples produced by 114 children enrolled in the…

This study examined the relationship between children's morphological awareness and their ability to produce accurate morphological derivations in writing. Fifth-grade US students (n = 175) completed two writing tasks that invited or required morphological manipulation of words. We examined both accuracy and error, specifically errors in…

This technical report describes the conceptual foundation and measurement properties of the Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation (RISE). The RISE is a 6-subtest, Web-administered reading skills components battery. The theoretical and empirical foundations of each subtest in the battery are reviewed, as well as item designs. The results…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

The purpose of this research was to ascertain if the reading comprehension skills of English-speaking fifth grade students improve when they study a second language. The research was done in an inner-city elementary school in Rochester, New York. The researcher provided a weekly after-school workshop in foreign languages for a group of children…

Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…