We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the explanatory factors for reading difficulties. Indeed, we explore the role of intellectual efficiency, perceptual abilities, oral language development, phonological processing and memory. The study of…

Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the shared, direct, and indirect contributions of three metalinguistic skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge) to the reading comprehension abilities of struggling adult readers. Across studies, these three metalinguistic skills have individually emerged as important…

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

I propose an integrative theoretical framework for reading and writing acquisition, called the interactive dynamic literacy model, after reviewing theoretical models of reading and writing, and recent efforts in integrating theoretical models within reading and writing, respectively. The central idea of the interactive dynamic literacy model is…

This study explored the relations between reading comprehension and two memory capacities, short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM), for adults who read between the third and eighth grade levels. With a sample of 407 adults from two countries, we computed correlations among measures and conducted hierarchical regression and commonality…

Purpose: This was an investigation of the dimensionality of oral and written language to test the hypothesis that a two-factor model with sound/word and sentence/discourse language levels would best fit language and literacy data for a population-based sample in the school-age years. Method: A stratified secondary data set of 1,500 participants…

The present study examined oral language growth differences in a sample of 256 Greek-speaking children with and without literacy difficulties (LD), during the first two elementary grades. Measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were administered in both grades for the…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

Reading ability is profoundly important, for individuals and for the societies of which they are a part. Research indicates that we should be successfully teaching 95% of children to read, yet, in reality, high rates of reading failure are common in western, industrialized nations. In large part, this reflects a failure to translate into practice…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…