Extensive research has demonstrated the importance of struggling reader identification in monolingual children Compton et al. ("Journal of Educational Psychology," 102, 327-340, 2010). However, very few studies have explored identification of struggling readers in bilinguals. The aim of this study was to investigate (1) the overlap of…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique learning experience, characterised by school closures and a shift to online learning. Research suggests that online learning during the pandemic negatively impacted the reading development of elementary school children. However, little is known about the challenges of learning a second language…

The present study examined the mediating role of text reading fluency in reading comprehension in English and Kiswahili utilizing longitudinal data from 628 first- and second-grade children from multilingual contexts in Kenya. We employed path analysis to explore the mediating role of text reading fluency on decoding and reading comprehension in…

Many children living in linguistically diverse low- and middle-income countries learn to read and write in multiple languages. Recent research provides implications for effective reading instruction with multilingual learners (e.g., Hall et al. in New Dir Child Adolesc Dev 166:145-189, 2019). However, there is limited empirical evidence on…

Fluency Assessment and Benchmarking for Literacy in Education (FABLe) is the first mobile application being developed for the assessment of foundational literacy skills in India. FABLe passages are currently available in English for Grades 2, 3 and 4, with plans to expand to other Indian languages. FABLe is designed to administer curriculum-based…

This study aimed to examine (a) the developing interrelations between the efficiency of reading individually presented words (i.e., isolated word recognition speed) and the efficiency of reading multiword sequences (i.e., word list and text reading fluency); (b) whether serial digit naming, indexing the ability to process multi-item sequences,…

We examined the cross-lagged relations between reading and spelling in five alphabetic orthographies varying in consistency (English, French, Dutch, German, and Greek). Nine hundred and forty-one children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and were tested on word and pseudoword reading fluency and on spelling to dictation. Results indicated…

Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five…

This study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading comprehension among French immersion students in Grades 2 and 3. A group of 66 students were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, vocabulary, word reading…

This quantitative research project analyzes the relationship between the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) subtest and the New York State English Language Arts (NYS ELA) test. The study was completed in Upstate New York using the results of the NYS third-grade tests from the 2017-2018 school…

We examined the direction of the relation between morphological awareness and reading/spelling skills in 2 languages varying in orthographic consistency (English and Greek) and whether word reading fluency and vocabulary mediate the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. One-hundred and 59 English-speaking Canadian and…

To examine cognitive correlates of dyslexia in Chinese and reading difficulties in English as a foreign language, a total of 14 Chinese dyslexic children (DG), 16 poor readers of English (PE), and 17 poor readers of both Chinese and English (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 17 children, drawn from a statistically representative sample…

Word reading fluency and word reading accuracy play a critical role in reading development (Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1986) and are related to multiple language components such as phonological, morphological, and vocabulary skills in monolingual children. Our knowledge about this relation remains limited in bilingual children, however. This study…

Can young students' early reading abilities in their first language (L1) predict later literacy development in a second language (L2)? The cross-language relationships between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) among 87 Hong Kong students were explored in a longitudinal study. Chinese word-reading fluency, Chinese rapid digit naming, and Chinese rhyme…