Cross-sectional studies have shown the connections between oral language, reading, and writing skills, but there has been limited longitudinal research, especially in primary school. This study examined the relationships between oral narrative, reading, and writing skills in a longitudinal sample of 80 Italian-speaking primary school children…

This short-form article discusses how college students can learn languages in the same way that K-12 students do and points out how teaching practices employed in K-2 classrooms that aid in bringing students from monolingualism to bilingualism can also be useful for college students as they become trilingual. Referring to theories presented at the…

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations…

This study examines the writing skills of students in grades 1 to 5 of an Italian-English two-way immersion program. Narrative writing samples were collected in both languages and scored for content, organization, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, text length, and overall total score. The results show that writing skills improved as a function of…

Most studies on narrative competence have focused on monolingual subjects, and there are very few studies which address this issue in bilingual subjects dealing with two language systems. In the present case study we analyzed and compared the textual and narrative written skills of three deaf and three hearing adolescents attending eighth grade at…

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = plus or minus 0.03) who were…