This study examines the intricate relationships between home language use, oral language skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and receptive vocabulary), and literacy skills (word reading and spelling) in English and Chinese among young bilinguals. The sample includes 249 first-grade and 263 third-grade bilingual students in…

Word recognition is a fundamental reading skill that relies on various linguistic and cognitive abilities. While executive functions (EF) have gained attention for their importance in developing literacy skills, their interaction with domain-specific skills in facilitating reading among different learner groups remains understudied. This study…

The Matthew effects suggest that children who struggle when learning to read are less likely to read for pleasure later in life compared to children who ease into reading quickly. One aspect of early literacy instruction that might hamper reading progress is learning to read simultaneously in two languages. Despite the long-lasting and widespread…

This article is one of the first attempts to study the mechanisms of foreign language learning by children with DLD. We test the effectiveness of a cognate intervention aiming to enhance cross-linguistic awareness of Dutch-speaking primary-school pupils with DLD, as part of their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum. The participants…

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…

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…

Despite much attention having been paid to foreign language (FL) reading and related variables such as self-efficacy, relatively few studies have focused on young learners, and even fewer on storybooks, arguably the commonest genre read by children worldwide for language learning. As FL learning commences at a young age in many contexts globally,…

Recent studies have proposed developments to the Simple View of Reading to reflect reading development across age groups and differences among learner profiles and account for additional factors that explain reading comprehension performance beyond word recognition and language comprehension. One of these proposals is the inclusion of cognitive…

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as planned instructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in a multilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognate identification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingual primary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identification of…

We examined the developmental trajectories and cognitive predictors of first language Chinese reading, second language English reading, and mathematics skills in Hong Kong children in Grades 1-5. We used longitudinal data of 1,000 children (M[subscript age] = 7.59 years) assessed on phonological awareness, rapid naming, and morphological awareness…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…

In the present study, we aimed to compare reading-writing relations between first-grade Native English Speakers (NESs) and English Language Learners (ELLs). Thirty-four ELLs and 35 NESs completed measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, lexical-level reading (word reading) and writing (spelling), and discourse-level reading (reading…

In the current study, we investigated the role of executive functions in explaining how word recognition and language comprehension jointly predict reading comprehension in multilingual and monolingual students (Grades 1 and 2). Specifically, mediation and moderation models were tested and compared to offer a more nuanced understanding of the role…

Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

The current study used principles of high-quality measurement design including domain specification, item generation, expert review, and piloting to develop two versions of a morphological awareness measure to be administered to 63 primarily English-speaking second grade students: the "Static Morphological Awareness Assessment (StMA)"…