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Listening comprehension involves the ability to understand and extract meaning from spoken sentences, stories, and instruction. This skill is vital for young children and has long-term effects on school achievement, employability, income, and participation in society. There is a lack of measures of young children's listening comprehension skills. We report on a new measure of listening comprehension (LURI) that we tested in a group of at-risk preschoolers. Using IRT (Item Response Theory) analysis, we examined the psychometric properties of the instrument. Moreover, in a series of regressions, we found that the LURI measure predicted a range of other language skills better than standardized measures. Thus, the LURI test is a reliable and valid measure of listening comprehension. Assessing listening comprehension is a time-effective way of measuring a skill critically important to language development and represents the product of a range of different oral language processes.

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge of target words across ability levels. Our results affirm the strong relation between vocabulary and reading at the individual level. Strong readers were more likely to know the meanings of words than struggling readers were, regardless of the features of the academic words tested. Words with more meanings were easier for all students, on average. The relation between word frequency and item difficulty was stronger among better readers, whereas the relation between word complexity and item difficulty was stronger among less proficient readers. Our examination of academic words' characteristics and how these characteristics relate to word difficulty across reading performance has implications for instruction.

There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. We explore the latent relationships of word features across three established word lists: the General Service List, Academic Word List, and discipline-specific word lists from the Academic Vocabulary List. We fit exploratory factor models using 22 non-behavioral, empirical measures to three sets of vocabulary words: 2,060 high-frequency words, 1,051 general academic words, and 3,413 domain-specific words. We found Frequency, Complexity, Proximity, Polysemy, and Diversity were largely stable factors across the sets of high-frequency and general academic words, but that the challenge facing learners is structurally different for domain-specific words. Despite substantial stability, there are important differences in the latent lexical features that learners encounter. We discuss these results and provide our latent factor estimates for words in our sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Listening comprehension involves the ability to understand and extract meaning from spoken sentences, stories, and instruction. This skill is vital for young children and has long-term effects on school achievement, employability, income, and participation in society. There is a lack of measures of young children's listening comprehension skills. We report on a new measure of listening comprehension (LURI) that we tested in a group of at-risk preschoolers. Using IRT (Item Response Theory) analysis, we examined the psychometric properties of the instrument. Moreover, in a series of regressions, we found that the LURI measure predicted a range of other language skills better than standardized measures. Thus, the LURI test is a reliable and valid measure of listening comprehension. Assessing listening comprehension is a time-effective way of measuring a skill critically important to language development and represents the product of a range of different oral language processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English‐speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge of target words across ability levels. Our results affirm the strong relation between vocabulary and reading at the individual level. Strong readers were more likely to know the meanings of words than struggling readers were, regardless of the features of the academic words tested. Words with more meanings were easier for all students, on average. The relation between word frequency and item difficulty was stronger among better readers, whereas the relation between word complexity and item difficulty was stronger among less proficient readers. Our examination of academic words' characteristics and how these characteristics relate to word difficulty across reading performance has implications for instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]