Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

Theoretical models of word recognition suggest that knowing what a word means makes it easier to learn how to decode it. We tested this hypothesis with at-risk young students, a group that often responds poorly to conventional decoding instruction in which word meaning is not addressed systematically. A total of 53 first graders received explicit…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

Concludes that when children learned confusable words, their subsequent learning of words was at a faster rate than those children who learned nonconfusable words first, and that high imagery words were learned more quickly than low imagery ones. (FL)

The effects of the use of traditional series readiness workbooks and subsequent delay in beginning reading instruction on reading achievement at the middle and end of first grade were investigated. Fifty-seven percent of the children in a suburban school district used traditional readiness workbooks and of the remaining 43%, some used non-series…

Twenty-four children each at the age levels of 6, 9, 12, and 15 years were tested on four types of experimentally determined conceptual clues in a study of concept identification and, therefore, language comprehension. Superordinates, similars, parts, and locations were selected as clue words, and the four clues were combined into all possible…