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Purpose-Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among oral vocabulary and narrative skills in a longitudinal sample of 24 Spanish/English bilingual children from low socioeconomic backgrounds so as to further our understanding of the development of oral proficiency.Method-English and Spanish data were gathered using standardized vocabulary tests and narrative elicitation tasks provided to kindergartners and first graders. Narratives were coded for length using two measures of productivity and for quality at two levels: story score and language score. Descriptive, correlation, multivariate, and regression analyses were conducted.Results-Significant gains from kindergarten to first grade were found for all English oral language measures. Despite showing improvements in English vocabulary, the majority of children continued to score below the monolingual mean in first grade. For English narrative productivity, total number of different words (TDW) proved to be a sensitive developmental measure in contrast to total number of words (TNW). In Spanish, significant gains were noted only for narrative story score. Kindergarten Spanish story scores predicted first-grade English narrative quality even when controlling for the effects of English vocabulary and English narrative productivity. First-grade Spanish narrative quality was best predicted by Spanish vocabulary.Implications-The need for early assessment and monitoring of expressive vocabulary and oral narrative skills, and the potential contributions of Spanish story organization skills to English narrative performance in bilingual children from low socioeconomic families, are highlighted. Keywordsnarrative; vocabulary; bilingual children; Spanish; cross-language associationsThe study of oral language skills is at the forefront of the current research agenda on improving literacy achievement in U.S. schools. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth identified English oral proficiency as a crucial area of concern for students who speak a language other than English at home (August & Shanahan, 2006). The panel found that when learning to read, languageminority children attain levels of performance that are similar to those of English monolinguals NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript in word-level skills (decoding, word identification, and spelling), but they lag considerably behind in text-level skills (reading comprehension and writing). Whereas English oral proficiency is not associated to word-level skills, it does predict English reading comprehension and writing, hence playing a critical role in explaining the disparity in literacy levels (August & Shanahan, 2006).Among the various English oral proficiency skills, vocabulary knowledge and narrative ability have been found to be important precursors to ...

Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic language proficiency construct, Core Academic Language Skills (CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas.Using the CALS-I, a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative instrument, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse crosssectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (GMRT), an academic vocabulary test (VAT), and a word reading fluency test (TOSWRF). GLM analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio-demographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of schoolrelevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators.

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4-8. The results revealed between-and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk--talk about non-present events, explanations, or pretend-at 30 months predicts 7 th -grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension.Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualized talk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomes remains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of child talk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of 7 th -grade AL proficiency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, and child syntactic comprehension.