This study aimed to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the Mathematics Writing (MW) of Chinese students. We conducted a comparison between MW and general writing on organizational features. The analysis was based on a sample of 138 sixth-grade students. Our findings revealed: (a) students demonstrated significantly higher performance in…

Early literacy and writing development are inter-related, yet predictors of beginning writing are less well studied than beginning reading. This study investigated contributions of school-entry name-writing to writing skills after 1 and 2 years of school in New Zealand above and beyond school-entry oral language and early literacy skills.…

Argumentation is a critical genre of writing that elementary school students are expected to develop, but little is known about how different domains of language contribute to argumentative writing. To explore this, we identified two domains of language: linguistic knowledge (lexical, morphological, and syntactic skills) and linguistic awareness…

This study examined the direct and indirect effects of foundational language (vocabulary and syntactic knowledge) and literacy (orthographic knowledge) skills, transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency), and higher-order cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and inferencing making) on writing among Chinese children. Participants were…

Guided by the Simple View of Reading (SVR considers reading comprehension as a product of decoding and listening comprehension) and the self-teaching hypothesis applied to Chinese (Li et al. in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24(3):252-263), this research examined (1) whether the SVR is applicable to L2 morphosyllabic Chinese;…

Teachers' knowledge of literacy has gained considerable interest over the last three decades, largely with a focus on the basic language constructs of phonological awareness and phonics. Fewer studies, however, have focused on spelling. Given the close relationship between reading and spelling and the necessity of an explicit understanding of the…

Infographics are a new type of reading material comprising textual and visual information that has been used worldwide. Nonetheless, there has been limited research investigating people's infographic-reading performance and the characteristics of superior readers. This study adopted Chinese texts and infographics as materials and employed…

The importance of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is an educational necessity. Determining which teacher characteristics define teacher quality and measuring their impact on student outcomes has offered mixed results. This study explored the effect of teachers' knowledge of language and literacy on their students' reading…

Students with reading difficulties such as dyslexia receive most of their instruction in mainstream classrooms, but many teachers feel inadequately prepared to teach students with dyslexia and/or report that dyslexia was inadequately addressed in their training. However, depending on a school's organization, it may be sufficient that classroom…

Previous research has demonstrated conflicting findings concerning orthographic access in older age. The current study examines whether older adults rely more heavily on stored knowledge while spelling, through testing of word concreteness. Forty-one younger (age 20-29), 41 middle age (age 45-55), and 40 healthy older adults (age 70-80) spelled 60…

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students' vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge…

This study examined the direct and indirect relations of foundational language skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge), higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and comprehension monitoring), and word reading to reading comprehension in Chinese. Consistent with the hierarchical relations specified in the Direct…

This study examined the effects of a classroom-focused intervention on different domains of early literacy. The intervention consisted of shared e-book reading combined with a print referencing technique done via a SMART board. The specific goal of the study was to examine whether children could be instructed simultaneously in print knowledge,…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of academic vocabulary and reading comprehension in data contributed by 5855 middle school students. Each student completed an academic vocabulary assessment, a standardized reading comprehension test, and one of four types of novel vocabulary-depth measures. "Multiword expressions"…

This study examined preschool teachers' writing knowledge and how this knowledge relates to classroom writing practices. Head Start teachers (N = 47) across two states participated by completing a knowledge questionnaire in which they responded to three vignettes and samples of preschool children's writing. Teachers' writing practices were…