This study investigated relationships between preschoolers’ oral discourse and their later skill at reading and writing. Thirty-two children participated in narrative and expository oral language tasks at age 5 years and reading comprehension and writing assessments at age 8 years. Children’s ability to mark the significance of narrated events through the use of evaluation at age 5 predicted reading comprehension skills at age 8. Children’s ability to represent informational content in expository talk at age 5 also predicted reading comprehension at age 8. Control of discourse macrostructures in both narrative and expository talk at age 5 was associated with written narrative skill at age 8. These findings point to a complex and differentiated role for oral language in supporting early literacy.

This study examined the efficacy of a supplemental, multicomponent adolescent reading intervention for middle school students who scored below proficient on a state literacy assessment. Using a within-school experimental design, we randomly assigned 483 students in grades 6 to 8 to a business-as-usual control condition or to the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI), a supplemental reading program involving instruction to support word reading skills, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, and peer talk to promote reading engagement and comprehension. We assessed behavioral engagement by measuring how much of the STARI curriculum activities students completed during an academic school year and we collected intervention teachers' ratings of their students' reading engagement. STARI students outperformed control students on measures of word recognition (d = .20), efficiency of basic reading comprehension (d = .21), and morphological awareness (d = .18). Reading engagement in its behavioral form, as measured by students' participation and involvement in the STARI curriculum, mediated the treatment effects on each of these three posttest outcomes. Intervention teachers' ratings of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement explained unique variance on reading posttests. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that (a) behavioral engagement fosters struggling adolescents' reading growth and (b) teachers' perceptions of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement further contribute to reading competence.Keywords: adolescent literacy, reading intervention, reading engagement, experimental design, ENGAGING ADOLESCENT READERS 3Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers to Improve Reading SkillsThe roughly one-quarter of U.S. eighth graders who score below basic on national assessments of reading (NCES, 2015) struggle with the reading demands of secondary school.They are challenged by expectations that they summarize textbook passages, use context to determine word meaning, and make text-based inferences. For many adolescents with reading difficulties, gaps in decoding and fluency compromise basic comprehension (Catts, Compton, Tomblin, & Bridges, 2012;Schatschneider, Fletcher, Francis, Carlson, & Foorman, 2004;Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). As a consequence, adolescent reading interventions often target word-and sentence-level skills in addition to skills related to meaning construction.Despite calls for increased attention to the needs of struggling adolescent readers (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Kamil et al., 2008), however, the impacts of existing multicomponent interventions have often been modest, especially when moved to scale in low performing schools and with teacher, rather than researcher, implementation (Edmonds et al., 2009;Scammacca et al., 2007;Solis, Miciak, Vaughn, & Fletcher, 2014;Wanzek et al., 2013).Student motivation and engagement are frequently cited as barriers to the success of adolescent literacy interventions (Kamil et al., 2008;Manset-Williamson & Nelson, 20...

Although research documents a key contribution of print skills to early literacy, vocabulary and other language skills also provide an important foundation. Focusing on a sample of several hundred low-income children in 16 urban schools that were implementing literacy interventions, 1st-grade predictors of literacy development were traced over time. Beginning-of-1st-grade letter-word identification and word attack skills were the strongest predictors of reading comprehension at the end of 1st grade. However, vocabulary was the best predictor of reading comprehension at the end of 2nd and 3rd grades. The predictive power of early print-related and phonemicawareness skills diminished over time, yet vocabulary scores remained an important predictor. Results support an early emphasis on developing meaning skills to prepare low-income children for success in literacy.Children whose family incomes are at or below the poverty level are especially likely to struggle with reading, a pattern that emerges early and strengthens in the elementary school years. On recent national assessments, only 43% of low-income fourth graders in large urban districts read at a Requests for reprints should be sent to:

This study compared the narrative abilities of mildly mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Twenty mildly mentally retarded children and 20 nonretarded children, matched on mental age, PPVT-R scores, and SES were audiotaped while narrating a wordless picture book story. Results showed no differences between the groups in narrative length, use of tense and conjunctions, and use of narrative devices. However, there were significant differences in use of reference, with the mildly retarded children using more definite article + noun character introductions, showing more pronoun confusion, and more often pronominalizing all references to the story protagonist. Control of reference in narrative is discussed as presenting a particularly challenging set of discourse abilities because it requires the child to integrate knowledge across a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic domains.

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