Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills.…

This intervention study examined the writing abilities of 1st (ages 6-7) and 2nd (ages 7-8) grade students in the Basque Autonomous Community, utilising Basque, Spanish, and English. We compared two distinct teaching methodologies: the PYCTO methodology, which employs a multilingual approach for teaching writing across the three languages, and the…

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a Tier 2 intervention within the context of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model implemented by Spanish first- to second-grade primary school teachers to improve at-risk students' transcription skills. Teachers were instructed in the administration of a writing curriculum-based…

Research Findings: Universal screening is the first stage in identifying students at risk for reading difficulties within a Response to Intervention model. However, there is a lack of validated screening tools for assessing reading abilities in first-grade students from Spain. This pilot study examines the technical adequacy, classification…

The main objectives of this study were to examine the type of adaptations made by Grades 1 through 3 primary school teachers working with children who are poor spellers of a transparent language such as Spanish and to analyze whether these adaptations were determined by the grade taught by these teachers. Using the total population of primary…

The main purpose of this study was to validate the curriculum-based measure "Indicadores de Progreso de Aprendizaje en Matemáticas" (IPAM [Indicators of Basic Early Math Skills]) in a local, Spanish-speaking context. This tool has been designed to identify first-grade students at risk for mathematics learning disabilities. The IPAM…

The main objective of this study was to analyze what writing measures, or combination of measures, would be most appropriate for early detection of students at risk of presenting future difficulties in learning to write in Spanish, in terms of tasks, scoring indices (dependent, independent and accurate-precision) and duration. A sample of 231…

The aim of this article is to explore how the teaching of English as a foreign language is planned in three plurilingual state schools in Catalonia. We carried out classroom observations (first and second grade of primary education) and interviewed the English teachers who teach these lessons and the headmasters of the three schools. The use of…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language…

Building a text is a multidimensional endeavor. Writers must work simultaneously on the content of the text, its discursive organization, the structure of the sentences, and the individual words themselves. Knowledge of vocabulary is central to this endeavor. This study intends (1) to trace the development of writer's vocabulary depth, their…

The main objective of this research was to analyze the impact of transcription skills of Spanish writers when writing an independently composed sentence within a writing-level design. The free-writing sentence task from the "Early Grade Writing Assessment" (Jiménez, in press) was used to examine the production, accuracy, speed, syntactic…

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization promoted the creation of a model instrument for individual assessment of students' foundational writing skills in the Spanish language that was based on a literature review and existing writing tools and assessments. The purpose of the "Early Grade Writing Assessment"…

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently…

Evidence of phonological awareness levels usually comes from English-speaking children. The evidence in Spanish is scarce. The present study examined the phonological awareness of syllables, onsets--rimes, and phonemes, extending the Treiman and Zukowski (1991) results to preliterate and literate Spanish-speaking children. The sample comprised…