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In this study, we examine the unique and shared contributions of Spanish and English core academic language skills (CALS) to English reading comprehension in a population of Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 4 and 5 (n = 165). We focus on cross-disciplinary CALS, operationalized as sets of high-utility lexical, syntactic and discourse resources prevalent in school texts. This study finds that Spanish and English CALS are positively and significantly related, and, further, that both sets of skills exert a unique positive influence on English reading comprehension. Aligned with an interpretation of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English academic language skills, results document their cross-linguistic contribution to reading comprehension for students enrolled in educational programs that foster literacy and content learning regularly in two languages.

In writing science summaries, student writers frequently borrow language fragments from source texts. While taking a text's ideas verbatim is commonly considered a failure in writers' expected use of their own words or even plagiarism, imitating "linguistic chunks" from skilled speakers is also an effective practice in language development. This study argues for the need to investigate textual borrowing (TB) from a developmental perspective. A total of 956 U.S. upper-elementary and middle school L1 students were administered a reading comprehension test, a written summary task, and a receptive academic language assessment. Multiple indices were generated to capture TB frequency, length, and one particular function of TB (i.e., definitions). Results revealed that 68% of summaries contained at least one incidence of TB. As expected, both TB frequency and length were negatively associated with reading comprehension and academic language skills. However, students in higher grades demonstrated significantly more and longer TB in comparison to their younger counterparts when summarizing the same passage. In addition, the frequency of borrowed word strings and the ratio of definitional borrowing were positively associated with summary writing quality, and the latter association was found to be stronger for students with higher academic language skills. Implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED614239.]

In this cluster randomized control trial study, the authors explored the efficacy of an intervention designed to improve second-grade English learners' knowledge of challenging, high-utility English vocabulary. The authors also examined whether the intervention had a differential effect on content words that differ on two attributes (cognate status and abstractness designation) and whether the effects lasted across time. Within schools, teachers were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions, resulting in 12 treatment classrooms and 10 control classrooms. Teachers in the treatment condition developed vocabulary using six methods: interactive shared reading, direct instruction of individual words, instruction in cognate use, activities to foster word consciousness and reinforce instructed words, and use of visual and linguistic supports. Teachers in the control condition read the same books with the target vocabulary inserted into the stories. Findings on the curriculum-based and standardized measure of vocabulary indicated that the intervention implemented for four 50-minute lessons per week for 18 weeks was effective in helping English learners acquire challenging high-utility school-relevant vocabulary (Cohen's d = 1.88 for content words; d = 0.41 for connecting words; d = 0.47 for the Test of Oral Language Development). The effects differed by word characteristics, with higher effect sizes for words that are noncognates (d = 1.57 for both concrete and abstract noncognates; d = 1.02 concrete cognates; d = 0.81 for abstract cognates). Ten months after the intervention, treatment students still outperformed control students on content vocabulary learned during the intervention (d = 1.31). This study helps validate a multifaceted approach to vocabulary intervention and research.

Academic language skills support mid-adolescents' comprehension of the language of school texts. To date, scarce research has explored associations between dual academic language skills and reading comprehension among mid-adolescent dual language immersion (DLI) students. This study examined individual differences in Spanish and English academic language skills and their contribution to English reading comprehension in a cross-sectional sample of DLI students in Grades 4-6 (N = 101). Taking advantage of a recently proposed construct, the core academic language skills (CALS), and the CALS instruments available in Spanish and English, dual academic language skills were examined as predictors of English reading comprehension. Results revealed that Spanish and English CALS were both significant predictors of English reading comprehension even after accounting for students' sociodemographic background, English proficiency designation, and English word reading fluency. Findings underscore the cross-linguistic contribution of Spanish academic language skills to English reading comprehension and highlight the importance of promoting these skills in both languages to support mid-adolescent DLI students' biliteracy development.

Two widely studied language skills in relation to reading comprehension are listening comprehension skill and academic language proficiency. Although their constituent skills and theoretical accounts of how they are related to reading comprehension share a large overlap, they have been studied in separate lines of work. In this study, we investigated the dimensionality of listening comprehension and academic language proficiency tasks, their relations to reading comprehension, and the impact of assessment modality (reading vs. oral language) of academic language proficiency, using data from children in Grade 2 (N = 350). Two cohorts of children from the same schools were assessed on the same set of listening comprehension, word reading, reading comprehension, and academic language tasks. Whereas the first three constructs were assessed in identical manner across the 2 cohorts, academic language tasks were assessed in different modalities (1 cohort in a reading context and the other cohort in an oral language context). Academic language proficiency and listening comprehension skill tasks were best described as having a general oral language construct that captured common variance among all the tasks as well as having specific residual factors. Students' average performance on academic language tasks was lower in the reading context, wherein students' reading skill was also captured beyond the academic "language" proficiency. Across assessment modalities, it was the general oral language construct, not the specific factors, that was reliable, and consistently and most dominantly related to reading comprehension after accounting for word reading. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED602242.]

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual English and bilingual students designated as English learners (N = 7,152) from the United States. The study investigated the dimensionality of the core academic language skills construct, the reliability and validity of the CALS Instrument, and the impact of school grade on students' performance in core academic language skills. Results revealed the assessment measure to be unidimensional and to discriminate performance by grade level. This study offers insight into the value of measuring cross-disciplinary school-relevant language proficiency, delineates skills to be targeted through instruction to support reading comprehension, and offers a tool to identify students who will benefit most from this instruction.

Although many adolescents struggle to comprehend text, the school-relevant language skills, which might contribute to variation in reading comprehension ability during this developmental period, remain understudied. To expand the research base, this study examines the concurrent development of academic language skills and reading comprehension in a sample of emergent bilinguals (EBs) and their English proficient (EP) peers (n = 573) followed over two academic years, from Grade six to seven. Parallel process latent growth modeling results reveal that academic language and reading comprehension skills develop concurrently, with growth rates in Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) positively associated with growth rates in reading comprehension. Furthermore, initial levels of CALS predicted rates of growth in reading comprehension. We also find that EBs, who are by definition in the process of acquiring English, begin Grade six with CALS that are far below their peers, but develop these skills at similar rates as their EP classmates. Results reveal the potential for CALS-focused instruction for improving adolescent learners' reading comprehension development, and highlight the particular relevance of supporting CALS for EBs, who are tasked with acquiring the language of print at the same time as they are acquiring other registers of English.

With a sample of 7,752 fourth- to seventh-grade students in 25 schools which were randomized at the school level to condition, this article reports experimental impacts of an enhanced version of Word Generation on student outcomes at the end of Year 1 and of Year 2. Word Generation employs analysis, synthesis, critique, and problem-solving activities to build students' academic language, perspective taking, and ultimately their reading comprehension. Results indicate that the program improves the proximate outcome of academic vocabulary included in the curriculum after the first and second year of implementation for all students (Y1 effect size (ES) = 0.22, Y2 = 0.28 for fourth and fifth graders; Y1 ES = 0.13, Y2 = 0.16 for sixth and seventh graders). For those in the fourth and fifth grades, their perspective positioning skills also improved at the end of the first year (ES = 0.14), and their academic language skills (ES = 0.06), perspective articulation and positioning skills (ES = 0.12, 0.19), and reading comprehension (ES = 0.15) improved at the end of the second year. Among sixth and seventh graders, there were improvements in perspective positioning skills (ES = 0.19) and reading comprehension (ES = 0.10) at the end of Year 2. Effects after both Years 1 and 2 were stronger in high-exposure classrooms.

Educators are aware of the need to promote students' academic language to support text comprehension. Yet, besides teaching academic vocabulary, many educators continue to ask, What would this instruction entail? Guided by a new framework known as core academic language skills (CALS), the authors' research focuses on delineating core language skills that contribute to reading comprehension to make them more visible to educators and researchers. In this article, findings from two studies are integrated to argue for a mixed-methods approach to advance academic language research and pedagogy. In study 1, the authors assessed upper elementary/middle school students' CALS and quantitatively examined the association between CALS and reading comprehension. In study 2, the authors used qualitative methods to collect and analyze students' oral reflections about academic language. Key findings from these studies and their implications for academic language pedagogy in today's schools are discussed.

"Deep reading comprehension" refers to the process required to succeed at tasks defined by the Common Core State Literacy Standards, as well as to achieve proficiency on the more challenging reading tasks in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) framework. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that three skill domains not frequently attended to in instruction or in theories of reading comprehension--academic language, perspective taking, and complex reasoning--predict outcomes on an assessment of deep reading comprehension. The Global Integrated Scenario-based Assessment (GISA; O'Reilly, Weeks, Sabatini, Halderman, & Steinberg, 2014) is designed to reflect students' abilities to evaluate texts, integrate information from an array of texts, and use textual evidence to formulate a position, all features of deep reading comprehension. We tested the role of academic language, perspective taking, and complex reasoning in explaining variance in end-of-year GISA scores, controlling for beginning-of-year scores and student demographics. All three predictors explained small, but significant, amounts of additional variance. We suggest that these three skill domains deserve greater attention in theories of reading comprehension and in instruction.

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4-8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support precise and concise academic writing and (2) paragraph-level structures for organizing written discourse, known as micro-genres. Writing studies typically elicit and analyze long compositions, instead the present study employed two brief writing tasks that allowed for the evaluation of language skills while minimizing the influence of topic knowledge and other non-linguistic factors. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that the two facets of language proficiency studied--lexico-grammatical skills and skill in producing paragraph-level structures (micro-genres)--represented distinguishable dimensions of productive language skill in this sample. On both dimensions, older writers (grades 6-8) demonstrated greater skill than 4th and 5th graders. These findings, which provide an initial proof of concept for the use of short writing tasks to study language skills that support academic writing, are discussed in relation to writing theory and pedagogy.

Multimodal composing is part of the Common Core vision of the twenty-first-century student. Two descriptive studies were conducted of fifth-grade students' digital folktale retellings. Study 1 analyzed 83 retellings in relation to the types and frequencies of modal use, such as image, sound, movement, and written text, as well as their retelling accuracy. Students composed within a scaffolded digital composing environment which comprised the PowerPoint authoring/presentation tool and a researcher-developed story frame. All students' retellings included writing and visual design, 80% included animation, and 70% included sound. Retelling accuracy scores averaged 54%. Study 2 was conducted with a new group of 14 fifth-grade students who had previous digital retelling experience. The retellings included the same types of modal use, but at a higher level of frequency. In their retrospective design interviews, students expressed design intentionality and a metamodal awareness of how modes work together to create an appealing story.

Despite a long-standing 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 Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I), a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative tool, 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 cross-sectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test), an academic vocabulary test (Vocabulary Association Test), and a word reading fluency test (Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency). General linear model 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 sociodemographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of school-relevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators.

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of an Internet-delivered universally designed depth of vocabulary intervention that targeted both English-speaking and Spanish-English-speaking students. Two hundred forty students, 49% of whom were Spanish-English bilinguals, participated in the 16-week intervention. Intervention students read eight multimedia texts with embedded instruction on 40 words and reading strategy support. Students could access all texts and activities in Spanish and English. In comparison to a control group, there were significant intervention effects on a standardized measure of vocabulary knowledge, but effects were non-significant for comprehension. Similarly, significant effects on researcher-developed measures of vocabulary depth were detected, but not for a researcher-developed measure of breadth.