Developing young learners' language awareness is becoming an important educational goal in a rapidly globalised world characterised by linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing upon previous research in the field, the article highlights the importance of promoting language diversity and nurturing language awareness from an early age. We present a…

Listening narrative comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text) and involves several linguistic and cognitive skills. However, the specific role of these skills in children's comprehension remains unclear.…

The present contribution aims at presenting an assessment tool (i.e., the TALK-assessment) built to evaluate the language development and school readiness of Italian preschoolers before they enter primary school, and its predictive validity for the children's reading and writing skills at the end of the first year of primary school. The early…

We investigated the predictive power of cognitive skills and background variables of 769 first and second grade children learning to read two orthographically different languages Finnish and German in three countries Finland, Germany and Italy. Main results from stepwise regression models showed that in all countries word reading at first grade…

The unit-decade compatibility effect is interpreted to reflect processes of place value integration in two-digit number magnitude comparisons. The current study aimed at elucidating the influence of language properties on the compatibility effect of Arabic two-digit numbers in Austrian, Italian, and Czech first graders. The number word systems of…

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = plus or minus 0.03) who were…

The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) contribute to identifying a model for the variables that compose the emergent literacy construct and their relationships; (2) assess the predictive power of the emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a transparent orthography language. We examined emergent literacy skills in 464 children…

In this longitudinal study we analyse the early phases of reading development in Italian and explore the transition from phonological to lexical reading. A group of 28 Italian children was tested in four phases. Language and cognitive skills were first assessed in the preschool. Reading performance was then tested in three different sessions, in…

States that reading and written spelling skills for words and nonwords of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. Finds that reading and written spelling are nonparallel processes and that developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems. (PA)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among receptive language skills, type of second-language acquisition program, and reading skills among Italian speaking first grade students in the English schools of Montreal, Canada. Half of the fourteen teachers and their classes were randomly assigned to the Richards-Gibson…

This manual in Italian provides a basic theory of reading and writing instruction for kindergarten and first grade teachers working in a bilingual setting. Reading and writing are seen as instruments of communication incorporating psychomotor, perceptual, conceptual, and logical skills. The manual covers the following areas: (1) the development of…

The guide presents content and techniques for teaching conversational Italian in the elementary grades. It contains an introductory section and 20 units for classroom instruction. The introduction includes notes on the overall objectives of the course, general guidelines on classroom procedure, and specific techniques for use of the materials…