From the current dissertation, possible useful educational insights can be derived for primary school teachers, school administrators, and policy makers. First, the present dissertation emphasizes the relevance for children to keep on track during early reading development, since high longitudinal stability in individual variation within and between reading and spelling components was evidenced. For educational practices, it is of importance that the reading performances which incrementally develop are stable over time. Every following step is highly predicted by previous steps in learning to read. In fact, the impact of previous skills was even found in the transfer from word decoding skills to spelling and reading comprehension, showing incremental development in the interaction between the reading components. This was found not only within the actual reading development components, but also in the transfer from cognitive and linguistic prereading skills towards actual reading and spelling. The combination of high stability within reading and spelling components, and the clear interaction between word decoding, spelling, reading comprehension, and related cognitive and linguistic skills, emphasize the relevance for teachers of being aware of small delays in all reading and reading related components from the very beginning of formal reading instruction. Teachers are encouraged to pay attention to recover these small delays in order to prevent children from later more severe reading problems. If children lag behind during one formative measurement, the treated subject matter during that phase in the curriculum should be repeated and practiced again instead of merely continuing
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to the next chapter of the curriculum. In the current sample, this procedure was more or less prescribed during the first year of formal reading instruction (Mommers et al., 2003), but continued in subsequent grades with a less systematic curriculum focused on reading comprehension.
Secondly, we showed how children may benefit from well-developed kindergarten precursor skills, leading to more successful reading development over time. The current findings emphasize that precursors related to lexical quality (Perfetti, 2007) should be considered already in kindergarten. For example, stimulating awareness in phonics based tasks, and training of vocabulary skills add to later reading performances. Although vocabulary is not directly contributive in the prediction of Grade 1 word decoding development, the impact of kindergarten vocabulary becomes even the more visible during (Grade 2 and 3) reading comprehension development three years later. It should be noted that not all cognitive skills could be trained, and training of a specific task does not always lead to transfer to the general skill (e.g., rapid naming and memory; Melby-Lervag, Redick, & Hulme, 2016). Thirdly, this project gives rise to the recommendation for early screening of children at risk for dyslexia based on family profiles. These children at risk are in need for extra attention during reading development and related skills, both from home environment and in school settings. In a similar frame of mind, the current project emphasizes the need for attention to linguistic diversity in learning to read. Proper developed vocabulary knowledge was shown to have a long standing influence on the development of later reading comprehension. Therefore, the results provide a strong indication that early language enrichment for L2-learners (e.g., by providing ECEC; “Early childhood Education and Care”; Leseman & Slot, 2014; OECD, 2018) might influence academic success on the long term.
As a final comment on the practical implications of the current dissertation, the results show how a broad variety of reading components and cognitive and linguistic prereading skills connect and interact with each other. It might, therefore, be too limited to solely focus on the specifically expressed problem component of children at risk or of children with actual established reading problems. Explicit instruction and practice of orthographic-phonological connections should, for example, come in conjunction with instruction of connections to semantic skills and comprehension. This phonics based approach should be embedded in meaningful contexts in order to simultaneously build better connections towards semantical information.
In addition, in the transitional development from oral towards reading vocabulary, we advocate for the use of explicit instruction of orthographic-phonological connections (through word reading), as well as of phonological-orthographic connections (through spelling). Embedding an integrated approach not only establishes a robust curriculum for learning to read for all children. It also allows for instantly monitoring the progress in learning to read, in line with a dynamic system approach of development. Multiple components could be assessed over time and their relationships could be interpreted. Therefore, immediate extra support could be provided for children at risk for reading problems, since tasks could be modified to individual variations as soon as deviations in development encounter. Our intend is not to argue against specific focus on problem domains as soon as they encounter. However, current results clearly show that all reading components influence and interact closely with each other. Therefore, we advocate for preventively focusing on more than one aspect of learning to read in an integrated approach of learning to read.
Conclusion
To conclude, results of the present dissertation expand our knowledge of how early word decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension develop, how these elements of early reading development are interrelated, and how this is incited prospectively by individual variation in cognitive and linguistic, as well as family risk and language background related profiles. High developmental stability was shown for the whole range of reading skills (word decoding, spelling, reading comprehension) from the start of reading instruction up to halfway Grade 3. In addition, word decoding development was found to longitudinally cross-contribute to the development of both spelling and reading comprehension skills. Therefore, the study indicates the longitudinal interrelation between orthographical, phonological, and semantic aspects in early reading development. The present dissertation indicates the processes of learning to read in a population wide sample, as well as in subsamples of children with specific profiles of family risk for dyslexia and of linguistic diversity to be highly related and highly dependent of cognitive and linguistic affordances attained already during kindergarten.
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