Using context to derive a word's meaning is typically conceptualized as part of the reading comprehension process. However, context sensitivity develops early--before children start to learn to read. This study took a developmental perspective, attempting to capture children's context sensitivity through spoken discourse and assess its value in…

The current study explores the contributions of written vocabulary and syntax to informational writing quality in Grades 5 through 8. Various aspects of language skills (receptive to written, oral register to academic register) have differing relationships with narrative and informational writing achievement across development. In this study, we…

Assessment of language skills for upper elementary and middle schoolers is important due to the strong link between language and reading comprehension. Yet, currently few practical, reliable, valid, and instructionally informative assessments of language exist. This study provides validation evidence for Monster, P.I., which is a gamified,…

This study investigated if the difficulty of instructional classroom English in primary teacher-guidebooks of English is adequately manipulated by learner-proficiency. Corpora of classroom English were compiled from 20 guidebooks from five publishers, approved following the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of Korea. Extracted materials from grades…

This investigation examined the structural relations among latent variables of language, decoding, and reading comprehension, invariance of the patterns of predictions, and unique and common variance over two years in grade cohorts 5 to 6, 7 to 8, and 9 to 10. Participants were 321 students in grade 5 in six elementary schools, 299 students in…

Purpose: The current study takes a practical and theoretically grounded look at assessment of morphological knowledge and its potential to deepen understanding of how morphological knowledge supports reading comprehension for students with limited reading vocabulary. Specifically, we explore how different morphological skills support reading…

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between language variables and writing outcomes with linguistically diverse students in grades 3-5. The participants were 197 children from three schools in one district in the mid-Atlantic United States. We assessed students' vocabulary knowledge and morphological and syntactical skill as…

Language comprehension is crucial to reading. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about what constitutes this multifaceted domain. We present two related studies examining the dimensionality of language comprehension and relations to reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Studies 1 (Grade 6; N = 148) and…

In this correlational study, we analyzed data from 71 Spanish-English biliterate students in grades 3 (n=21), 4 (n=23), and 5 (n=27) with the goal of investigating the applicability of the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in English and in Spanish for this population. The simple view posits that decoding…

International comparisons of economic understanding generally require a translation of a standardized test written in English into another language. Test results can differ based on how researchers translate the English written exam into one in their own language. To confirm this hypothesis, two differently translated versions of the "Basic…

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English,…

This study explored the relationship between the reading ability and science achievement of students in grades 5, 8, and 9. Reading ability was assessed with four measures: word recognition, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and comprehension (23% of all passages were on science topics). Science achievement was assessed with state…

The overall objective of this article is to examine how oral language abilities relate to reading profiles in English language learners (ELLs) and English as a first language (EL1) learners, and the extent of similarities and differences between ELLs and EL1s in three reading subgroups: normal readers, poor decoders, and poor comprehenders. The…

We examined theoretical issues concerning the development of reading fluency and language proficiency in 390 English Language Learners (ELLs,) and 149 monolingual, English-as-a-first language (EL1) students. The extent to which performance on these constructs in Grade 5 (i.e., concurrent predictors) contributes to reading comprehension in the…

When children begin to connect spoken speech to print, regardless of their language, they all encounter disparities between oral and written representations. Children who speak the African-American English (AAE) dialect at home and in their communities may encounter an even greater number of disparities between oral and written representations…