Reading and Writing

Fluency and rate-based assessments, such as curriculum-based measurement, are frequently used to screen and evaluate student progress. The application of such measures are especially prevalent within special education and response to intervention models of prevention and early intervention. Although there is an extensive research and professional literature on the development and evaluation of such measures, there is much left to learn with ongoing and future research. This special series presents a series of papers that explore newer topics and plant the seeds for future innovations.

Convergent evidence suggests that, for bilingual learners, well-developed morphological awareness in the first or second language may facilitate second language reading comprehension. However, there may be important differences between types of morphological awareness which could affect the degree to which second language reading comprehension is facilitated. In this study, we investigated how different types of morphological awareness in Chinese and English contributed to English vocabulary and reading comprehension for English as Foreign Language (EFL) students. Eighth-grade Chinese EFL students (n = 49) completed researcher-designed assessments of derivational and compound awareness in both Chinese and English, as well as standardized tasks of vocabulary and reading comprehension in English. Measures were administered twice in a six-month interval. We used hierarchical linear regression to investigate contributions of Chinese and English morphological awareness to English vocabulary knowledge and English reading comprehension. As expected, we found moderate correlations across languages for both derivational and compounding morphology. However, contrary to our hypotheses of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness, Chinese derivational awareness did not explain unique variance in either English vocabulary or reading comprehension. In fact, only English derivational awareness explained significant unique variance in English reading comprehension and only English compound awareness explained unique variance in English vocabulary knowledge. These findings may inform future intervention research to improve English reading-related skills.

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been cross-orthographic comparisons made between some alphabetic scripts and a few syllabic scripts. In the present study of Japanese Grade 1 children learning to read hiragana, a syllabic script, there was a comparison of assessments of oral word reading accuracy levels recorded by scorers with different backgrounds. The results showed that cultural conventions of criteria for children’s word accuracy implied varying degrees of sensitivity to lexical pronunciations. A consequence of these unrecognized conventions in previous research was an overestimation of the hiragana word reading ability of Japanese beginner readers. For practitioners teaching and assessing reading in their own language and orthography (either alphabetic or syllabic), as well as researchers (e.g., testing the orthographic depth hypothesis), these results have implications for obtaining valid measures of accurate lexical pronunciations (as distinct from syllabogramic or graphemic) in oral word reading.

We report two experiments investigating the effect of phonological priming on the recognition of two types of Chinese characters: compound targets which contain separate radical components; and integrated targets which do not contain separate radicals. We used a masked priming paradigm with varying prime-target exposure durations. In Experiment 1, phonological priming effects on compound target recognition were found following a 50 msec SOA. However, there was no evidence of phonological priming on integrated target recognition at this SOA. In Experiment 2 we investigated the time course of phonological priming effects at three prime-target SOAs (30, 50 and 80 msec) in a between-subjects design. Semantic priming effects were also investigated. Phonological priming effects on compound target recognition were found following the 50 msec and the 80 msec SOAs. However, there was no evidence of phonological priming on integrated target recognition at any SOA. Semantic priming effects on both compound and integrated target recognition were found in the 50 msec and the 80 msec SOA conditions suggesting that phonological and semantic activation are co-incidental during compound character recognition. We conclude that character type constrains the activation of phonology during Chinese character recognition.

We examined the relationships among phonologicalawareness, phonological memory, and development ofreading skills in a longitudinal study, by following222 Finnish preschoolers through the grade 2.The main focus was on the role of phonological memoryin word recognition and comprehension. The skillsassessed were verbal abilities, phonological memory,phonological awareness, word recognition, listeningand reading comprehension, altogether comprising themost extensive set of variables so far used in thestudy of phonological memory and reading. We proposeda structural equation model for the developmentalrelationships among the variables. This model waslargely confirmed by the data. The most significantpredictor of word recognition was phonologicalawareness. Phonological memory had only a weak effecton phonological awareness at preschool age, andvia this connection, a weak indirect effect on grade 1 word recognition. Contrary toexpectations, phonological memory also had asignificant, albeit weak effect on grade 2word recognition. Phonological memory did notdirectly affect reading comprehension. However,it was strongly related to listeningcomprehension at preschool, and via the strongeffects of both listening comprehension and wordrecognition on reading comprehension, there weresignificant indirect effects of phonological memory onreading comprehension. The results also underline thestability of development of phonological memory, wordrecognition, and comprehension from preschool to theend of grade 2.

The development of reading skills in language minority (LM) learners, particularly during the middle school years, remains unclear despite the increasing need for educators to serve this rapidly growing population. In this study, the English reading comprehension growth of middle school LM learners was investigated using a longitudinal design and the simple view of reading as a theoretical framework. Students were assessed at four time points between fifth and seventh grades on standardized measures of listening comprehension, word reading, and reading comprehension. Individual growth modeling revealed that both listening comprehension and word reading assessed in fifth grade predicted the elevation of students’ developmental trajectories in reading comprehension. However, neither skill predicted students’ growth in reading comprehension, and there was no significant variation across children in growth rates, indicating that students in seventh grade remained on a trajectory established in fifth grade. The implications of the slowing rate of reading comprehension development during the middle school years are discussed.

This study examined the heterogeneity of early literacy profiles of English learners and non-English learners. Utilizing a latent profile analysis, the degree to which distinct learner profiles emerged was examined using code-based and language-based measures administered in the beginning of first grade. Participants included 11,803 English learners and 34,129 non-English learners. Three early literacy profiles emerged for English learners while four profiles emerged for non-English learners. Both sets of profiles can be identified based on the severity of students’ difficulties with component skills rather than the specificity of their difficulties. Resulting profiles in both samples were then utilized to predict performance on a measure of broad reading comprehension administered at the end of first and second grade. Results indicated that the profile that was associated with the greatest success on the later measures of reading comprehension for both samples included the strongest performance on measures of both code-related and language-related skills. Results highlight the heterogeneity of early literacy skills within the English learner and non-English learner populations and demonstrate the importance of designing instruction that addresses the severity of a student’s skill deficit.

Common depictions of the simple view of reading (SVR), in both research and practice, describe reading comprehension difficulties by using the dichotomous variables of “poor” and “good” for each of its three constructs. But these fail to accurately capture the role the product of the two subcomponents of word recognition and language comprehension plays in defining such difficulties. When the skills in both subcomponents are “good,” most depictions show reading comprehension as “good” – but this is not what the SVR holds. This can lead users of the SVR to both overlook the great variation in reading comprehension skills that are possible within each of the SVR’s defined reading difficulty types as well as misunderstand that reading comprehension may still suffer even when both word recognition and language comprehension do not. This article first reviews the SVR and its main predictions, followed by an overview of the evidence bearing on these. The article then describes how reading comprehension difficulties are defined under the SVR, presenting graphics that employ continuous variables that accurately reflect these definitions. The article concludes with a discussion of classification studies that have investigated SVR-defined reading difficulties and their findings of cases of good skills in word recognition and language comprehension coupled with poor reading comprehension. The article argues that these can be interpreted as consistent with the SVR rather than counter to it.

Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children’s reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling—effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls— and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our emerging bilingual participants. Seven-three children (36 males) were followed from Grades 1 to 3 in a French immersion program in which instruction was entirely in French. We conducted cross-lagged panel models of orthographic knowledge, word reading, and spelling that included controls of phonological awareness, non-verbal ability. In terms of temporal order, word reading (at grade 1) and word spelling (at grade 2) predicted gains in each of English and French orthographic knowledge. In contrast, early orthographic knowledge did not predict gains in word reading or word spelling in either language. In terms of transfer, from their earliest point of measurement, English word reading and spelling consistently predicted later French orthographic knowledge; French word reading and spelling contributed to English orthographic knowledge only from Grade 2. These findings illustrate a dynamic picture of the relations between orthographic knowledge and word reading and spelling both within and across languages, informing current models of each reading with both monolinguals and bilinguals.