The results of the current study have some clear practical implications. Many schools already use kindergarten screening of phonological awareness and grapheme knowledge to arrive at an early identification of children at risk for later word reading problems. Indeed, these precursors have been evidenced to be predictive of word decoding development. However, the current study indicated that it cannot simply be assumed that the same precursors are the best predictors for reading comprehension. Kindergarten literacy skills including the full range of precursors of lexical quality and
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of memory skills were evidenced to add to the identification of children at risk for literacy problems. Specifically, vocabulary, memory skills, and word decoding skills are the best predictors for later reading comprehension problems, and turn out to be valuable for insight into later reading development. Reading comprehension two years later was predicted by kindergarten cognitive and linguistic skills, even over and above the contribution of word decoding skills. Along with a growing body of research findings, we therefore advise special attention to children who lag behind in kindergarten cognitive and linguistic skills such as vocabulary, since it turns out to be difficult to catch up later during literacy development (Verhoeven, 2000). Especially, we emphasize the need for early enrichment for L2 learners to reduce or prevent later reading comprehension difficulties in L2 learners. Early enrichment could involve Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC; Leseman & Slot, 2014; OECD, 2018), which provides L2 learners with specific opportunities to encounter, use, and practice the second language. This is enhanced by storybook reading, rich and meaningful play contexts using oral language, and implicit and explicit cognitive and linguistically-based learning experiences. Also, if possible, parents should be involved in the learning experiences in the ECEC program, to stimulate further practice of language skills at home (e.g., storybook reading). The impact of the delay in L2 learners in terms of kindergarten vocabulary, rapid naming, and phoneme segmentation might be overlooked, since this delay does not immediately impact the early word decoding development in Grade 1. However, results of the current study clearly show that it does impact reading comprehension development in later grades. This, in turn, might also affect general academic performances, suggested by the secondary school Programme for Internal Student Assessment (PISA), in which L2 learners still tend to achieve below the national average on a variety of academic domains (Stanat & Chistensen 2006). The finding of similar stability in autoregressive effects for both L1 and L2 reading comprehension, implies that similar approaches may be used for L2 learners in terms of reading comprehension instruction. Rather, there should be early differentiation in instruction based on actual performances on reading comprehension in general. Poor comprehenders in Grade 2 should be signaled early and immediately get extra support, to avoid lagging behind in later grades. The finding of interrelatedness between word decoding and reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 learners, implies that both classroom instruction and individual intervention should emphasize the integration of skills that are involved in word decoding and reading comprehension.
Conclusion
To conclude, the current study highlights the comparable developmental trajectories of early word decoding and reading comprehension in first and second language learners. The groups perform similar on kindergarten grapheme-to-phoneme knowledge, phoneme isolation, nonverbal reasoning, memory skills, and on later word decoding development. However, the groups do differ in semantically related kindergarten skills of RAN, phonological awareness, and vocabulary, and on reading comprehension scores. Both groups build upon kindergarten predictors for both word decoding and reading comprehension.
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