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…

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different language skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, to retrieve information from multiple sources, and compose an essay for a specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute to successful…

This study examined the effects of early phonological training on emergent phonological and reading skills. Children (N = 364) were randomly assigned in small groups to a phonological training group (n = 117), or a control group (n = 247) including both a non-phonological training group and a non-trained control group. The phonological training…

We constructed a new taxonomy for inferential thinking, a construct called Integrative Inferential Reasoning (IIR). IIR extends Pearson and Johnson's (1978) framework of "text-implicit" and "script-implicit" question-answer relations, and integrates several other prominent literacy theories to form a unified inferential…

Educators' content knowledge is considered a key determinant of classroom practices and thus children's learning. In this study, we examine the nature of associations between early childhood educators' literacy content knowledge and their classroom emergent literacy practices. Specifically, we apply generalized additive modeling to consider three…

The purpose of this study was to examine the shared, direct, and indirect contributions of three metalinguistic skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge) to the reading comprehension abilities of struggling adult readers. Across studies, these three metalinguistic skills have individually emerged as important…

Phonological awareness has been found to be an important skill underpinning reading development in several alphabetic languages. However, the development of phonological awareness and its relationship to reading development can be influenced by the nature of the language under investigation. While understanding this relationship in Thai language…

The relationship between 2nd and 3rd grade teachers' linguistic knowledge and spelling instructional practices and their students' spelling gains from fall to spring was examined. Second grade (N = 16) and 3rd grade (N = 16) teachers were administered an instructional practices survey and a linguistic knowledge test. Total scores on the two…

As readers struggle to coordinate various reading- and language-related skills during oral reading fluency (ORF), miscues can emerge, especially when processing complex texts. Following a miscue, students often self-correct as a strategy to potentially restore ORF and online linguistic comprehension. Executive functions (EF) are hypothesized to…

Learning how to write is a challenging process, typically developed in schools. Teachers' practices in teaching writing, however, have been under researched. The aim of this study was to survey a sample of teachers from Portugal (n = 96) and Brazil (n = 99) about their practices for and perceptions about writing instruction. Teachers reported on…

Increasingly, reading research has begun to address how students' linguistic environments may explain their reading achievement. In this exploratory analysis, we investigated how the rates of specific instructional talk moves predicted student reading comprehension achievement. Transcripts from third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (teacher…

One-hundred-fourteen kindergarten through third-grade teachers from seven different schools were surveyed using "The Survey of Preparedness and Knowledge of Language Structure Related to Teaching Reading to Struggling Students." The purpose was to compare their definitions and application knowledge of language structure, phonics, and…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979, 2000) states that children's second-language (L2) proficiency is, to some extent, a function of their first-language (L1) competence. Previous studies have examined this hypothesis with focus on a unidirectional relation from L1 to L2. In the present study, we examined…

This study examined the contributions of vocabulary and spelling to the reading comprehension of students in grades 6-10 who were and were not classified as English language learners. Results indicate that vocabulary accounted for greater between-grade differences and unique variance (?R[superscript 2] = 0.11-0.31) in comprehension as compared to…

In Flanders, there are neither Flemish assessments nor teacher surveys to provide insights into the current practice and outcomes of writing instruction. In the present study, we provide a-state-of-the-art study of the practice of writing instruction in Flemish late elementary education by investigating: (a) how writing is taught, (b) how teachers…