Language is essential for making meaning in written communication, and argument writing is a key genre of schooling to which language contributes rich resources for constructing different types of arguments. Despite being a challenging language practice, argument writing research lacks investigation into the language demands of this writing genre.…

Educationally-oriented measures of handwriting fluency--tasks such as written alphabet recall and sentence copying--conflate graphomotor skill and various higher-level abilities. Direct measurement of pen control when forming letters requires analysis of pen-tip velocity associated with the production of sub-letter features that, in a skilled…

A growing number of primary school students experience difficulties with grapho-motor skills involved in handwriting, which impact both form and content of their texts. Therefore, it is important to assess and monitor handwriting skills in primary school via standardized tests and detect specific grapho-motor parameters (GMPs) which impact…

Spelling and handwriting are related skills which are critical for writing but are typically assessed separately. Doing so makes it more difficult to understand their respective development. We describe the creation and evaluation of a tool for their concurrent assessment: the Spelling and Handwriting Legibility Test (SaHLT). We examined whether…

The relationship among three writing motivation and affective constructs (writing self-efficacy, perceived value of writing, and writing apprehension) and writing performance was examined among 273 Chinese fourth graders. The structural equation modelling results showed that the direct path from writing apprehension to writing performance was…

Reading comprehension is contingent on both oral language comprehension and word-level reading ability, skills that are thought to be intrinsically related in the early school years. However, while previous studies examining bidirectional relationships among oral vocabulary and reading development have generally found an association between word…

Examining changes in the longitudinal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and three types of morphological awareness (MA), a cross-lagged design was conducted with a sample of 146 Chinese children. Homophone awareness, homograph awareness, compounding awareness, and vocabulary knowledge were measured in grades 1 (T1), 2 (T2), and 3 (T3),…

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less…

The goal of this study was to examine the relation of morphological skills with reading fluency in 2nd grade Greek-speaking children and if phonological awareness and vocabulary mediate their relation. The sample consisted of 105 2nd grade Greek-speaking students (46 males; Mage = 7.83 years, SD = 3.31). Morphological awareness was assessed with…

Recent studies have shown that fluent reading of word lists requires additional skills beyond efficient recognition of individual words. This study examined the specific contribution of between-word processing (sequential processing efficiency, indexed by serial digit RAN) and subskills related to text-level processing (vocabulary and syntactic…

Repeated reading (RR) is often recommended for promoting reading fluency, but it is unclear whether continuous texts or word lists should be used. This study tested whether the effects of RR depend on the reading material and whether these effects interact with students' prior abilities. N = 304 primary school students were randomly assigned to…

Orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge of conventions of a written language) has been identified as a predictor of both basic and higher-level reading processes, however, mostly examined in a cross-sectional design. It remains unclear, whether and how orthographic knowledge contributes uniquely in explaining differences in the acquisition of…

The present study aimed to investigate whether and how Chinese single character reading and 2-character word reading can reflect somewhat different processes. Tasks of Chinese rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and nonverbal intelligence tasks,…

Morphological awareness has been shown to contribute to the acquisition of literacy in various languages. The current study focuses on an explicit derivational morphology training program in French-speaking fourth graders with the aim of measuring direct effects on morphological awareness and transfer effects on spelling and reading. The intensive…

Purpose: This study examines the developmental interplay between silent reading fluency and reading comprehension from Grade 1 to Grade 9 (age 7 to 15) in a large Finnish sample (N = 2,518). Of particular interest was whether the associations are bidirectional or unidirectional. Methods: Children's silent reading fluency and reading comprehension…