This study examined how top-down control influenced letter-speech sound (L-SS) learning, the initial phase of learning to read. In 2020, 107 Dutch children (53 boys, M[subscript age] = 106.845 months) learned eight L-SS correspondences, either preceded by goal-directed or implicit instructions. Symbol knowledge and artificial word-reading ability…

This study examined the role of writing task types and L2 reading proficiency on young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing performances. The participants were 185 students (Grades 7 and 8) from Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. The students responded to a descriptive and an email writing tasks that assessed their writing…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

Background: Numerous studies have investigated the relationships between various student, home and contextual factors and reading achievement. However, the relationship between such factors and reading attitudes has been investigated far less, despite the fact that theoretical frameworks of large-scale assessments and school effectiveness research…

The appropriateness of innovative educational concepts for students from a low socioeconomic status (SES) or ethnic minority background is sometimes called into question. Disadvantaged students are supposed to benefit more from traditional approaches with Programmatic Instruction (PI). We examined Developmental Education (DE), an innovative…

The accuracy of students' relative comprehension judgments when reading texts is typically rather low. This has been ascribed to students grounding their comprehension judgments on cues that are not diagnostic of their actual comprehension level. Asking students to complete causal diagrams--a diagramming scaffold--before judging comprehension has…

We examined the response to a phonics through spelling intervention for children with developmental dyslexia in word and pseudoword reading efficiency and word spelling. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent the response to the intervention is robust across different cognitive profiles (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and…

In this study, an educational development approach is investigated aiming at improving reading comprehension outcomes in primary education through inquiry and design-based Science & Technology teaching. The context is societal pressure to increase the likelihood that more students, later in their life, will aspire for careers in…

To examine what kinds of parent-child interactions are elicited by different literacy-related activities, an exploratory study was conducted with 19 mother-child dyads. Although prompting boards are widely incorporated in pre- and primary school curricula, and in various family literacy programmes, scientific knowledge supporting their use is…

Research Findings: The present study compared effects of explicit instruction on and practice with the phonological form of words (form-focused instruction) versus explicit instruction on and practice with the meaning of words (meaning-focused instruction). Instruction was given via interactive storybook reading in the kindergarten classroom of…

A few studies suggest that gifted children with dyslexia have better literacy skills than averagely intelligent children with dyslexia. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that giftedness-related factors provide compensation for poor reading. The present study investigated whether, as in the native language (NL), the level of foreign language…

In this study word reading (WR) fluency was used to dichotomously classify 1,598 Dutch children at different cutoffs, indicating (very) poor or (very) good reading performance. Analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristics were used to investigate the effects of rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in predicting…

We compared students from schools with an enriched school library--that is, one with a larger and more up-to-date book collection--with students from schools with a typical school library. We tested effects of an enriched school library on reading motivation, reading frequency, and academic skills. Fourth- and fifth-grade students of 14 schools…

This study compared how lexical quality (vocabulary and decoding) and executive control (working memory and inhibition) predict reading comprehension directly as well as indirectly, via syntactic integration, in monolingual and bilingual fourth grade children. The participants were 76 monolingual and 102 bilingual children (mean age 10 years,…

Employing a large sample of children from Dutch regular elementary schools, this study assessed the contributing and discriminating values of reading disability (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to two types of phonological processing skills, phonemic awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). A second objective was…