Argumentation skills are emphasized by the common core state standards (CCSS) and are viewed as essential for success in college, career, and life. Our project aims to develop formative assessment tasks measuring students' argumentative reading and writing skills. We used the framework of the "Discuss and Debate Ideas" key practice…

Convergent evidence suggests that, for bilingual learners, well-developed morphological awareness in the first or second language may facilitate second language reading comprehension. However, there may be important differences between types of morphological awareness which could affect the degree to which second language reading comprehension is…

Concerns about the negative effects of digitalization on students' reading comprehension, empirically backed by recent meta-analyses, question the efficacy of digital tools in the language arts classroom. By analyzing data from 4 and 8th grade US students from NAEP 2017, we aimed to test the generalization of the negative association between…

This study investigates the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between polysemous word knowledge and reading comprehension among bilingual students (n = 107) followed from seventh to eighth grade. Standardized tests were used to measure decoding skills, broad vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Data about students' polysemous…

Writing is critical for college and career readiness, yet secondary students in America are not good writers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). Unfortunately, researchers know relatively little about secondary students' writing skills, and even less about their digital writing. In this study, we explored prior computer use, keyboard…

We examined the contributions of English proficiency, genre, and the use of textual sources to adolescent writing. The sample included 1819 native English speakers and language minority students from 127 seventh- and eighth-grade classes in an urban school district. Students were randomly assigned one of three source-based essay prompts…

We examined the influence of teachers' use of instructional time on students' learning within the context of a randomized controlled trial investigating the effects of a content-area reading comprehension intervention. Participants were 8th grade social studies teachers who had their classes randomly assigned to either Promoting Acceleration of…

A few studies suggest that gifted children with dyslexia have better literacy skills than averagely intelligent children with dyslexia. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that giftedness-related factors provide compensation for poor reading. The present study investigated whether, as in the native language (NL), the level of foreign language…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…

It has been suggested that linguistic proximity affects the ease of acquisition between typologically similar languages, due to the fact that the languages have shared phonological and orthographic properties (Koda, 2008). Thus, a native Hebrew speaker learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) would be expected to easily develop linguistic…

In Study 1, children in grades 4-9 (N = 88, 29 females and 59 males) with persisting reading and/or writing disabilities, despite considerable prior specialized instruction in and out of school, were given an evidence-based comprehensive assessment battery at the university while parents completed questionnaires regarding past and current history…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of some aspects of the Arabic phonological system on spelling English words. In Study 1, the spelling performance of Arabic students from grades four and six was compared with English students in cognate phoneme pairs which exist across both languages (/d/ and /t/), and pairs in which…

As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between…