There is considerable focus in public policy on screening children for reading difficulties. Sixty years of research have not resolved questions of what constructs assessed in kindergarten best predict subsequent reading outcomes. This study assessed the relative importance of multiple measures obtained in a kindergarten sample for the prediction of reading outcomes at the end of 1st and 2nd grades. Analyses revealed that measures of phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, and naming speed consistently accounted for the unique variance across reading outcomes whereas measures of perceptual skills and oral language and vocabulary did not. These results show that measures of letter name and letter sound knowledge, naming speed, and phonological awareness are good predictors of multiple reading outcomes in Grades 1 and 2.

It is widely accepted that deficits in phonological awareness skills are related to reading difficulties. Recently, another source of reading difficulty has been identified that involves naming speed, and combined impairments in phonological skills and naming speed will produce more severe reading deficits than single deficits in either of these cognitive skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the consequences of grouping children based on the presence or absence of deficits in these skills. We demonstrate that the greater severity of reading impairment found in children with a double deficit could be due in part to a statistical artifact caused by grouping children based on their performance on two correlated continuous variables. This artifact also makes it difficult to establish the relative impact of deficits in naming speed on reading ability independent of deficits in phonological awareness.

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Two studies of Grade 1 reading interventions for English-language (EL) learners at risk for reading problems were conducted. Two samples of EL students were randomly assigned to a treatment or untreated comparison group on the basis of their language of instruction for core reading (i.e., Spanish or English). In all, 91 students completed the English study (43 treatment and 48 comparison), and 80 students completed the Spanish study (35 treatment and 45 comparison). Treatment students received approximately 115 sessions of supplemental reading daily for 50 minutes in groups of 3 to 5. Findings from the English study revealed statistically significant differences in favor of treatment students on English measures of phonological awareness, word attack, word reading, and spelling (effect sizes of 0.35–0.42). Findings from the Spanish study revealed significant differences in favor of treatment students on Spanish measures of phonological awareness, letter-sound and letter-word identification, verbal analogies, word reading fluency, and spelling (effect sizes of 0.33–0.81).

The effectiveness of an explicit, systematic reading intervention for first-grade students whose home language was Spanish and who were at risk for reading difficulties was examined. Participants were 69 students in 20 classrooms in 7 schools from 3 districts who initially did not pass the screening in Spanish and were randomly assigned within schools to a treatment or comparison group; after 7 months, 64 students remained in the study. The intervention matched the language of instruction of their core reading program (Spanish). Treatment groups of 3 to 5 students met daily for 50 min and were provided systematic and explicit instruction in oral language and reading by trained bilingual intervention teachers. Comparison students received the school's standard intervention for struggling readers. Observations during core reading instruction provided information about the reading instruction and language use of the teachers. There were no differences between the treatment and comparison groups in either Spanish or English on any measures at pretest, but there were significant posttest differences in favor of the treatment group for the following outcomes in Spanish: Letter-Sound Identification (d = 0.72), Phonological Awareness composite (d = 0.73), Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised Oral Language composite (d = 0.35), Word Attack (d = 0.85), Passage Comprehension (d = 0.55), and two measures of reading fluency (d = 0.58-0.75).

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme elision, were measured in Spanish and in English and analyzed via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis at the task level. Results showed that the PA tasks defined a unitary construct at both the student and classroom levels in each language. English and Spanish PA factors were related to each other (.93 and .83 at the student and classroom levels, respectively) as well as to word reading, both within languages (correlations estimated between .74 and .93) and across languages (correlations estimated between .47 and .79). Although the PA constructs were statistically separable in each language, the high correlation between Spanish and English PA indicates considerable overlap in these abilities.

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