A key to reducing reading difficulty, particularly for children living in poverty, is to provide high quality, explicit, and well-planned instruction from the start of a child's school career. Preschools that provide quality language, literacy, and content instruction have produced promising positive effects on children's later academic…

Although word reading has traditionally been viewed as a foundational skill for development of reading fluency and comprehension, some children demonstrate "specific" reading comprehension problems, in the context of intact word reading. The purpose of this study was to identify specific patterns of errors associated with reading…

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to…

Reading comprehension--the ability to understand the meaning of text--is a foundational ability that enables children to learn in school and throughout life. Children who struggle with reading comprehension in the third or fourth grade are at high risk for dropping out of school, with detrimental effects on their future employment, income, and…

Modern behavior-genetic studies of twins in the United States, Australia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom show that genes account for most of the variance in children's reading ability by the end of the 1st year of formal reading instruction. Strong genetic influence continues across the grades, though the relevant genes vary for reading words…

Purpose: We investigated a small-group intervention designed to teach vocabulary and comprehension skills to preschoolers who were at risk for language and reading disabilities. These language skills are important and reliable predictors of later academic achievement. Method: Preschoolers heard prerecorded stories 3 times per week over the course…

Many children learning English as an additional language (EAL) show reading comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding. However, the relationship between early language and reading comprehension in this group is not fully understood. The language and literacy skills of 80 children learning English from diverse language backgrounds and 80…

Purpose: We investigated a small-group intervention designed to teach vocabulary and comprehension skills to preschoolers who were at risk for language and reading disabilities. These language skills are important and reliable predictors of later academic achievement. Method: Preschoolers heard prerecorded stories 3 times per week over the course…

Early intervention aims to prevent poor literacy outcomes associated with social disadvantage. This study examined whether the short-term positive effect of a preschool classroom-based oral language and phonological awareness (PA) programme was maintained and transferred to literacy 2 years later. The vocabulary knowledge, grammatical skill,…

Lervag and Hulme’s neuro-developmental theory and Wolf and Bowers’s double-deficit hypothesis were examined in this longitudinal study. A total of 130 children were tested in preschool and followed through fifth grade, when 84 remained in the study. During preschool and kindergarten the participants were given tests of end-sound discrimination…

The simple view of reading (SVR) provides a conceptual framework for describing the processes involved when readers comprehend text. Strong evidence for the SVR comes from factor-analytic studies showing dissociations between decoding and comprehension skills. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether predecoding and comprehension…

This article focuses on some of the linguistic components that underlie letter-sound decoding skills and reading comprehension: specifically phonology, morphology, and syntax. Many children who have reading difficulties had language deficits that were detectable before they began reading. Early identification of language difficulties will…

A synthesis and meta-analysis of the extant research on the effects of storybook read-aloud interventions for children at risk for reading difficulties ages 3 to 8 is provided. A total of 29 studies met criteria for the synthesis, with 18 studies providing sufficient data for inclusion in the meta-analysis. Read-aloud instruction has been examined…

Young children living in poor urban neighborhoods are often at risk for reading difficulties, in part because developing listening comprehension strategies and vocabulary knowledge may not be a priority in their prekindergarten classrooms, whose curriculums typically focus heavily on phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge. Prereading…

A meta-analysis of vocabulary interventions in grades pre-K to 12 was conducted with 37 studies to better understand the impact of vocabulary on comprehension. Vocabulary instruction was found to be effective at increasing students' ability to comprehend text with custom measures (d = 0.50), but was less effective for standardized measures (d =…