Purpose
The objective of this study is to examine the impact of children’s cognitive and linguistic skills in kindergarten on their reading and spelling development at the end of 1st and 2nd years of primary school across languages. Focus is on the difference between Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden) with regular spelling and the US and Australia with irregular spelling, respectively.
Result
Overall, the connection between early linguistic and cognitive skills and the subsequent reading and spelling development in the 1st and 2nd years of primary school is very similar across spelling in the English-speaking and Scandinavian countries mentioned.
Scandinavian children perform as well as English-speaking children in assignments on phonological encoding and spelling in the 1st year of primary school. However, the regular spelling of a language seems to have some influence on the accuracy of recoding, which is paramount for both phonological encoding and spelling during the first years of primary school. Moreover, written knowledge and general oral ability to predict spelling in the 1st year of primary school seem to be different across the countries. However, researchers assess that this can be explained on the basis of cultural differences rather than spelling differences.
Design
The study is designed as a prospective cohort study, where children are tested in kindergarten as well as at the end of 1st and 2nd years of primary school. The children were tested individually. In kindergarten they were tested in linguistic and cognitive skills, including written knowledge, phonological awareness, quick response, oral memory, vocabulary, grammar and morphology, for 45 minutes a day for five days at home or at kindergarten. In the 1st (age 6) and 2nd years (age 7) of primary school they were presented with reading and spelling assignments such as the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) (only in 2nd year) as well as the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT).
References
Furnes, B.; Samuelsson, S. (2009). Preschool Cognitive and Language Skills. Predicting Kindergarten and Grade 1 Reading and Spelling: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison. Journal of Research in Reading, 32(3), S. 275-292.
Financed by
The study is part of the first author’s doctoral dissertation, but is also part of a larger project funded by the Australian Research Council, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the Research Council of Norway, the Swedish