Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…

Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness--the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language--has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal…

Participants were administered multiple measures of phonological awareness, oral language, and rapid automatized naming at the beginning of kindergarten and multiple measures of word reading at the end of second grade. A structural equation model was fit to the data and latent scores were used to identify children with a deficit in phonological…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…

In this study we evaluated whether the sophistication of children's invented spellings in kindergarten was predictive of subsequent reading and spelling in Grade 1, while also considering the influence of well-known precursors. Children in their first year of schooling (mean age = 66 months; N = 171) were assessed on measures of oral vocabulary,…

This study evaluated the extent to which existing measures met standards for a continuous suite of general outcome measures (GOMs) assessing children's early literacy from preschool through early elementary school. The study assessed 316 children from age 3 years (2 years prekindergarten) through Grade 2, with 8 to 10 measures of language,…

"Leveled Literacy Intervention" ("LLI") is a short-term, supplementary, small-group literacy intervention designed to help struggling readers achieve grade-level competency. The intervention provides explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, oral language skills, and…

The simple view of reading proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word reading and language comprehension. In this study, we used the simple view framework to examine the early prediction of reading comprehension abilities. Using multiple measures for all constructs, we assessed word reading precursors (i.e., letter knowledge,…

Early literacy intervention programs are predicated on the understanding that children's early literacy performance in preschool is one of the most important early predictors of subsequent school success. As the largest U.S.-funded early literacy intervention program, Early Reading First (ERF) sought to advance the language and literacy…

This article reports on the preliminary findings of a two-staged empirical study aimed at gaining insights into the variables salient in the early language and literacy development of young English language learners (ELL). Increasingly, young ELL, whether foreign-born or Canadian-born, arrive at school with little developed English-language…

This report documents the design, development, and psychometric characteristics of the assessment instruments used in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). The ECLS-K is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. The ECLS-K was designed to assess the…