While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and…

Background: Spelling is a vital component of literacy. This is because spelling includes multiple metalinguistic components, such as phoneme-grapheme awareness, orthographic awareness and morphophonemic knowledge. Despite this, there remains, to date, insufficient literature on spelling in the Southern Bantu languages and, more specifically, in…

This paper examines the content of alphabet books published for Russian-speaking children in Latvia, Estonia and Poland in the 1920s and explains the nexus between socio-cultural context and representation of social environment and children's interactions to explore strategies of adaptation offered to children. The textbooks were quantified using…

Metalinguistic awareness (MLA) is a predictor of adult foreign language (FL) learning in instructed settings. Following Bialystok and Ryan (1985) two-component model of MLA, we distinguish ML analysis as the ability to compare and select language items from ML control as the ability to detect and manipulate rule-based linguistic patterns. So far,…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of two Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) early literacy measures with first-grade Korean speaking English Learners (ELs). A total of 30 first-grade Korean ELs were screened three times during the year using early literacy measures from DIBELS. A sample of students was…

This study explored receptive vocabulary size and early literacy skills (namely: letter naming, knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences and early writing) in emergent bilingual Northern Sotho-English children. Two groups of Grade 1 learners were tested in both English and in Northern Sotho. Group 1 (N = 49) received their formal schooling in…

This study explored the predictive effects of within- and cross-language early literacy indicators with regard to second language (L2) reading achievement in a Grade 3 entry-point French immersion (FI) program. Kindergarten students (N = 83) in a regular English program were administered English early literacy measures. Three years later, once…