“…Recent studies have found that students’ CALS predict reading comprehension in English-speaking students in Grades 4 to 8, above and beyond word-level reading fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and student sociodemographic factors, for students designated as English proficient or English learners (Barr et al, 2019; Phillips Galloway & Uccelli, 2019b; Uccelli et al, 2015). Consistent findings have been reported in studies that examined students’ CALS as predictor of reading comprehension in Spanish-speaking samples in multiple Latin American countries, including Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Perú (Meneses et al, 2017; Romero et al, 2021) and in Portuguese in Brazil. Aligned with prior research conducted in English, these studies on Spanish or Portuguese CALS have found consistently that CALS predict reading comprehension, even when controlling for basic word recognition skills, vocabulary knowledge, and sociodemographic factors.…”