Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used…

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme…

This study compares 2 measures of reading comprehension: (a) the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension test, a standard in reading research, and (b) the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC), an innovative measure. Data from 192 Grade 3 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) were used to fit a series of latent variable…

Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was…

A new measure of reading comprehension, the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC), designed to reflect central comprehension processes while minimizing decoding and language demands, was pilot tested. We conducted three pilot studies to assess the DARC's feasibility, reliability, comparability across Spanish and English,…