Predicting Progress in Early Literacy Skills

This study focused on predicting progress in letter reading, word reading, letter spelling, and word spelling in first grade for children with language and communication problems. A sample of 78 second-year kindergartners was followed until the end of first grade. With respect to predictors, linguistic, phonological, and orthographic skills were considered, but also reading and spelling level at an earlier point in time. To account for all possible kind of processes, three linear and one nonlinear regression models were used to accomplish the analyses. The best predictor of level of and progress in letter reading, word reading, letter spelling, and word spelling in first grade is the same skill at an earlier point in time. Although the pattern of progress in letter reading between kindergarten and first grade, letter spelling, and word spelling appears to be continuous, the pattern of progress in letter reading and word reading between the middle and the end of first grade is discontinuous. The results also indicate a Matthew effect for word reading only. Reading and spelling are fundamental and important skills in society and education. Education is based on the ability to read and spell, so failure in these areas will have large consequences for learning. For decades, researchers have looked into predictors of reading and spelling, to make early identification of problems in these areas possible. The majority of prediction studies on reading and spelling followed children from kindergarten into first or second grade. The general pattern of this research resulted in a coherent set of predictors for reading, namely, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming. This is shown in Table 1. It presents an overview of studies that have investigated the main predictors of early reading in normally developing children. Although research on predicting spelling ability is much rarer (Naucler, 2004), the general pattern of predictors of early spelling is similar to that of reading. Table 2 presents an overview of studies that have investigated the main predictors of early spelling in normally developing children, and the main predictors are again letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and working memory. The fact that letter knowledge is one of the best predictors of reading and spelling performance is not surprising. After all, reading and spelling in an alphabetical language requires the knowledge of all graphemes (i.e., letters or letter clusters) that represent the phonemes of the language. Less obvious is the role of phonological awareness for the prediction of literacy skills. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to recognize, discriminate, and manipulate the sounds of the language (e.g., Anthony & Francis, 2005). Phonological awareness is a broadly defined concept and the reviewed studies reveal that a large number of different tasks has been used to measure phonological Predicting Progress in Early Literacy Skills awareness. Adams (1990) identified five levels of phonemic awareness in which tasks can be classified. At the most basic level, the child only has to have ear for the sounds of words. This level includes performing rhyming tasks. For example, the child might be asked to tell which of the three words does not rhyme: ‘hat’, ‘cat’, ‘dog’. At the second level, the child has to be able to compare and contrast the sounds of words in rhyming and alliteration tasks. For example, the child might be asked to tell which of three words begins with a different sound: ‘dog’, ‘sun’, and ‘doll’. At the third level, the child is familiar with the notion that words can be divided into phonemes, and knows how the phonemes sound in isolation. Examples of tasks are blending phonemes or syllable-splitting. For phoneme blending, the child has to listen to the sounds and put them together to form a word. For example, the instructor might say ‘/c/-/a/-/t/’ and the child has to say ‘cat’. At the fourth level, the child has to be able to segment phonemes. For this task, the child has to say which sounds it hears in a particular word. For example, the instructor might say ‘dog’, and the child has to respond with ‘/d/-/o/-/g/’. At the final level, the child has to be able to manipulate phonemes, like adding, deleting or moving phonemes. For instance, a child might be asked to say ‘monkey’ without the ‘/k/’. Skills at the phoneme level (third, fourth, and fifth level) are better predictors of reading than onset-rhyming skills (first and second level; e.g., Hulme et al., 2002). Rapid naming is also a less obvious predictor and refers to the ability to retrieve phonological codes stored in long-term memory (Allor, 2002). The rapid-naming ability is measured by the amount of time a child needs to name stimuli, like digits, letters, colors or pictures. Rapid naming is associated with reading, since both skills require the child to learn arbitrary associations between symbols and sounds (Manis, Seidenberg, & Doi, 1999). Some other required abilities are also similar for rapid naming and reading, like visual-motor coordination, serial scanning of text, accessing word names and meanings rapidly from memory, and articulation. Working memory appears to be one of the best predictors for spelling, and to a lower extent for reading. However, recent studies have shown that this aspect of cognition appears to add to the understanding of both reading and spelling skills. Working memory is considered to span both the storage and processing of information. To be able to read, one has to keep track of the coupling of letters to phonemes in the right order, that is, from left to right with respect to its graphemes and from first to last with respect to its phonemes. If this process does not proceed properly, reading and spelling may be hampered. An important conclusion from the above is that the main predictors of early reading and spelling in normally developing children are all language-related skills: letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and working memory. Children who have deficits in this area are children with language and communication problems. These children are at risk for developing reading and spelling problems. In the Netherlands, these children are either attending a special-education school for language and