In the context of the critical need to support children's early language development, teacher knowledge may enhance children's opportunities to build linguistic skills. In this study we explored how early childhood teachers' (n = 86) pedagogical content knowledge for language and vocabulary, and their book-reading implementation across the school…

Prosodic sensitivity--the rhythmic patterning of speech--is theorized to influence reading and spelling via vocabulary knowledge, phonological, and morphological awareness. Previously this conceptual model has been evidenced with children who can already read, however as orthographic knowledge can be used to complete phonological awareness tasks…

The relationships of different levels of phonological processing (sounds in heard and spoken words for whole words, syllables, phonemes, and rimes) to multi-leveled functional reading or writing systems were studied. Participants in this cross-sectional study were students in fourth-grade (n = 119, mean age 116.5 months) and sixth-grade (n = 105,…

Students from Turkish-speaking families are the largest minority language group in Germany. Yet, little is known about this group's literacy development. Using data from a 3-year longitudinal study, we examined whether the same base reading skills are involved in early reading comprehension of 100 Turkish-German bilingual and 69 German monolingual…

In the present study, we examined the influence of kindergarten component skills on writing outcomes, both concurrently and longitudinally to first grade. Using data from 265 students, we investigated a model of writing development including attention regulation along with students' reading, spelling, handwriting fluency, and oral language…

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the role of the "First Language First" model for preschool bilingual education in the development of vocabulary depth. The languages studied were Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among bilingual children aged 4-5 years in Israel. According to this model, the children's first language of…

Given the increase of bilingual students in the K-12 public school system, understanding reading comprehension performance, especially among this population, has been a major focal point in the research literature. This study explores the nature of reading comprehension among a sample of 123 Spanish-English bilingual elementary students. We add to…

To date, there have been few causally interpretable evaluations of the impacts of preschool curricula on the skills of children at-risk for academic difficulties, and even fewer studies have demonstrated statistically significant or educationally meaningful effects. In this cluster-randomized study, we evaluated the impacts of a literacy-focused…

Alternative models of the structure of individual and developmental differences of written composition and handwriting fluency were tested using confirmatory factor analysis of writing samples provided by first- and fourth-grade students. For both groups, a five-factor model provided the best fit to the data. Four of the factors represented…

The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the developmental patterns in pseudoword reading and oral reading fluency in Spanish and English for Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in grades 1-3, and (b) investigate whether initial status and growth rates in reading fluency in Spanish and English, significantly predicted reading…

This study examined the type of growth model that best fit within-year growth in oral reading fluency and between-student differences in growth. Participants were 2,465 students in grades 3-5. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses modeled curriculum-based measurement (CBM) oral reading fluency benchmark measures in fall, winter, and spring…

This study compared the English spelling of native Spanish-speaking children receiving English-only instruction with monolingual native English speaking children at the end of kindergarten. In invented spelling, young bilingual children can show us how they perceive the unique sounds of English by the way they map English letters onto non-Spanish…

Third and fifth grade children (average age 8.6 and 10.6 years) and adult participants were tested with printed words of varying length in a new on-line identification task (the luminance increment paradigm, LIP) and a speeded naming task. Effects of general length (length in letters, phonemes and syllables) were shown to decrease systematically…

Considers the prospects and need for a psychologically plausible connectionist model of the development of word recognition skills. Emphasizes the importance of phonological skills as precursors and facilitators of learning to read. Argues that it may be possible to develop a connectionist model which will be more consistent with evidence from…

Declares that invented spelling ability reflects young children's developing awareness of the internal structure of words. Examines effects of an instructional approach that emphasized integration of language analysis teaching into the whole-language kindergarten curriculum. Finds that children who received instruction were representing all the…