Environmental, Motivational, and Cognitive Predictors of Emergent Literacy and Reading Skills

This thesis consists of three separate papers broadly examining how different environmental and child variables affect language and literacy acquisition in two or more orthographies. The first paper is a quantitative meta-analysis of studies that have examined the effects of shared book reading on language, emergent literacy skills, and reading achievement with preschool children. The results suggest that shared book reading explained approximately 7% of variance in all the language and literacy measures combined, which is comparable to earlier studies. The mean effect size of shared book reading was slightly larger for the combined language measures (d = 0.77) than for the combined emergent literacy measures (d = 0.57), or the combined reading achievement measures (d = 0.63). An examination of the effects of shared book reading on specific language, emergent literacy, and reading skills revealed that shared book reading is more related to receptive language than to expressive language, to letter knowledge and print concepts than to listening comprehension and phonological awareness, and to word identification than to decoding and reading comprehension.;The third paper reports on a cross-linguistic longitudinal study that examines the predictors of word reading fluency, passage comprehension, and spelling in children learning to read in an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and in an orthographically consistent language (Greek). Letter knowledge and vocabulary skills of 45 English-speaking children and 67 Greek-speaking children attending Kindergarten were examined. The parents of the children responded to a questionnaire on home literacy activities and the teachers filled out a questionnaire on children's task-focused behaviour. The same children were reassessed on word decoding and reading fluency in Grade 1, and on reading fluency, passage comprehension, and spelling in Grade 3. Results indicated that home literacy factors did not directly predict Grade 3 reading or spelling skills for either the English- or Greek-speaking samples. Task-focused behaviour directly predicted spelling for the Greek-speaking sample. Vocabulary was more important for reading and spelling in English than in Greek. Letter knowledge was more important for spelling in Greek and for passage comprehension in English.;This thesis concludes with a general discussion that tries to integrate the results of the studies within current theoretical models of reading acquisition.;The second paper examines the effects of home literacy (shared book reading, teaching activities, and number of books), children's task-focused behaviour, and parents' beliefs and expectations about their child's reading and academic ability on Kindergarten children's (N = 61) phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge and on Grade 1 word reading. The results showed that after controlling for nonverbal IQ and vocabulary, parent teaching activities prior to Kindergarten predicted significantly letter knowledge; parents' beliefs about their children's reading ability predicted significantly phonological sensitivity and Kindergarten word reading; and children's task-focused behaviour predicted significantly letter knowledge and Kindergarten and Grade 1 word reading. Shared book reading did not account for unique variance in any of the dependent variables.