It is widely recognized that individuals with dyslexia have difficulties with word reading and spelling, and individuals with reading comprehension difficulties have low vocabulary knowledge. However, little is known about the extent to which spelling and vocabulary are informative of reading difficulties. In the present study, we investigated…

Background: Spelling is a prevalent strategy to teach children to read. However, research on the mechanism underlying the contribution of spelling to reading comprehension in Chinese children is limited. Methods: The primary aim of this study was to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal associations between spelling and reading comprehension…

Reading performance in third grade has significantly declined across the United States in recent years, suggesting a critical problem that was addressed in this study. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the perspectives of K-3 teachers working in a rural elementary school district regarding a decline since 2018 in the…

Definitions of dyslexia typically make reference to unexpected poor reading, although how best to operationalize unexpected remains an issue. When operationally defined as reading below expectations based on the level of oral language, cases of unexpected poor reading make up fewer than half of cases of poor reading, and cases of unexpected poor…

Purpose: Oral narrative, or storytelling, skills may constitute a linguistic strength for African American children, with implications for academic and social well-being. Despite this possibility, few studies have examined individual differences in oral narrative skill among African American children. To address this gap in the literature, this…

In early Finnish reading instruction, hyphens are used to denote syllable boundaries. However, this practice slows down reading already during the 1st grade. It has been hypothesized that hyphenation forces readers to rely more on phonology than orthography. Since hyphenation highlights the phonology of the word, it may facilitate reading during…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

This study examined how teachers and paraprofessionals in 126 kindergarten-second grade general and special education classrooms talked with their 194 students with autism, and further, how individual student characteristics in language, autism symptoms, and social abilities influenced this talk. Using systematic observational methods and factor…

Hey Siri, Alexa, Google, can you help me learn to read? Speech recognition apps can take dictation. Elementary, middle, high school students, and adults, who struggle to read can dictate to speech recognition apps and see their oral vernacular become written words. However, at the time of this study, speech recognition apps remained notoriously…

Purpose: This study examined performance of dual language learners (DLLs) on Spanish- and English-language narrative story retells and unique tells. Transcription and analysis focused on comparisons of common microstructural language sample measures in Spanish and English across tasks. Each language sample measure was evaluated for its possible…

This study focused on the phonological awareness skills of 72 Spanish-English and 86 Cantonese-English bilinguals, all enrolled in bilingual and mainstream classrooms in the same schools. Bilinguals were assessed on phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge of book reading each year from kindergarten until second grade.…

This study examined developmental profiles of reading fluency and reading comprehension in Grades 1 to 9 (ages 7 to 15) in a large Finnish sample (N = 2,518). In addition, early predictors of the profiles were analyzed with respect to kindergarten cognitive skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid automized naming [RAN], number…

Purpose: This study examines the extent to which the Home Literacy Environment (HLE) as measured by reading habits and resources, library use, and subscriptions or materials, as well as parental reading beliefs predict both language skills (i.e., vocabulary) at kindergarten and students' trajectories of growth from kindergarten (K) to grade 3…

Many primary grade students are not afforded nonfiction-rich opportunities, with fiction comprising the majority of books read aloud in classrooms. With the Common Core Standards recommending that half of the texts made available to students be nonfiction, educators are increasing their use of informational text. The present study explored the…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…