This study centered on emergent bilingual (EB) students with specific reading comprehension deficits (S-RCD), that is, with poor reading comprehension despite solid word identification skills. The participants were 209 students in Grades 2 to 4, including both EBs and English monolinguals (EMs) with and without S-RCD. Mean comparisons indicated…

Conventional wisdom suggests that students classified as learning disabled will exhibit difficulties with foreign language (FL) learning, but evidence has not supported a relationship between FL learning problems and learning disabilities. The simple view of reading model posits that reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and…

This study examined the effects of direct instruction in the phonology/orthography of Spanish on the native language skills and foreign language aptitude of 14 high school women at risk for foreign language learning problems. Pretest/posttest comparisons with students not at risk showed that subjects made significantly greater gains on…

Forty Spanish-speaking children with reading disability (RD) were matched for age and reading level with normal readers. Since RD children performed more poorly than younger normal readers on a word/nonword naming task in orthographically transparent Spanish, results suggest their poor phonological skills were due to a deficit in phonological…