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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.

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students produced captions for images related to each word. The captions were scored using a 4-point depth scale, and similarities and differences between bilingual and monolingual students were assessed. Results indicated a significant effect of depth of word knowledge in predicting reading comprehension, particularly for students with average to strong oral language skills. (Contains 1 footnote, 6 tables, and 1 figure.)

Purpose: Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among oral vocabulary and narrative skills in a longitudinal sample of 24 Spanish/English bilingual children from low socioeconomic backgrounds so as to further our understanding of the development of oral proficiency., Method: English and Spanish data were gathered using standardized vocabulary tests and narrative elicitation tasks provided to kindergartners and first graders. Narratives were coded for length using two measures of productivity and for quality at two levels: story score and language score. Descriptive, correlation, multivariate, and regression analyses were conducted., Results: Significant gains from kindergarten to first grade were found for all English oral language measures. Despite showing improvements in English vocabulary, the majority of children continued to score below the monolingual mean in first grade. For English narrative productivity, total number of different words (TDW) proved to be a sensitive developmental measure in contrast to total number of words (TNW). In Spanish, significant gains were noted only for narrative story score. Kindergarten Spanish story scores predicted first-grade English narrative quality even when controlling for the effects of English vocabulary and English narrative productivity. First-grade Spanish narrative quality was best predicted by Spanish vocabulary., Implications: The need for early assessment and monitoring of expressive vocabulary and oral narrative skills, and the potential contributions of Spanish story organization skills to English narrative performance in bilingual children from low socioeconomic families, are highlighted.