This study investigated whether teachers' observations of pragmatic language competence predict literacy skills (and the reverse) in students referred for reading disabilities in Oman. A sample of 574 at-risk children between 7 and 12 years old participated. Teachers rated students' pragmatic language, reading, and written expression. Results…

We examined the relation of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills, namely phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. We also examined potential moderators of the relations (grade level, orthographic depth of language, receptive vs.…

With a one-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) analysis based on 49,416 individuals from 267 independent samples and 210 studies, the current study systematically investigated models including meta-linguistic skills, decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension for Chinese population. Findings showed that (1)…

In the past decades, society in general has become strongly diverse. This change also affects schools. As a result, learning groups cannot be seen as homogeneous and taught in this way. One of the challenges is students' linguistic skills. Dealing with different linguistic competencies should not only be a focus of formal education in schools but…

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual…

Despite a long-standing awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic-language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic-language…