Aiming to verify the predictive value of oral narrative structure on reading acquisition, we followed 253 children (first and second graders) during an entire school year, assessing oral narratives and reading performances in five sessions. Transcriptions of oral narratives were represented as word-recurrence graphs to measure connectedness…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Purpose: We examine the content, context, and management of literacy learning opportunities in a large, diverse sample in the US and whether these opportunities were differentiated by children's oral language and decoding skill levels. Method: A total of 1,404 children in 153 preschool-through-third-grade classrooms were observed for several…

This study investigates what early elementary students do during a new listening task and the effects of teaching listening strategies. An instructional programme was implemented in four classes of 6- to 7- year-olds in low socioeconomic index schools in French-speaking Belgium. In three classes, there was explicit teaching of listening…

We examined the relations of language skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension, and oral retell), transcription skills (spelling and handwriting fluency), and domain-general cognitions/executive functions (working memory and attentional control) to writing quality for English-Spanish emergent bilingual children in Grade 1. Data were from a…

Purpose: Fourth grade typically involves shifting the instruction from "learning to read" to "reading to learn," which can cause students to struggle. However, early reading intervention guided by assessment has demonstrated effectiveness in preventing later reading difficulties (RD). This study presents a classification and…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) introduced the "fourth-grade slump" to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin introduced the fourth-grade slump to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of discrimination are…

Moving the hands or chewing in the encoding stage enhances memory, because body movement activates the frontal cortex, which is crucial to the memory process. However, how hand movement facilitates word memory in an applied setting and whether it produces long-term effects remain unclear. Grade 1 students studied 15 new words through different…

Purpose: There are well-established links between oral language and reading development in monolingual English-speaking children that are associated with literacy outcomes. Oral language, defined relative to lexical quality, provides key support for developing early reading skills. For bilingual children, the connection between oral language and…

Purpose: Understanding the experiences of families of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) during COVID-19 educational disruptions is essential for designing responsive supports during pandemic recovery efforts and beyond. This qualitative study describes the experiences of families of first- and second-grade children with DLD…

The Direct Method, a pedagogical approach for teaching additional languages through immersion, emphasizes oral interaction and everyday language usage to facilitate language acquisition. This method discourages reliance on translation and minimizes emphasis on grammatical rules. However, a fundamental question arises about the effectiveness of…

Purpose: We conducted a randomized control trial of an instructional program, SRSD Plus, which integrates reading for writing to inform, writing, oral language, spelling and handwriting for students in Grades 1 and 2. Method: A total of 10 teachers and their 248 students in Grade 1 (n = 121) and Grade 2 (n = 127) in the southwestern part of the US…

Purpose: Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell,…