Do We ‘Laugh’ or ‘La8gh’? Early Print Knowledge and Its Relation to Learning to Read in English and French

ABSTRACT Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children’s reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge – of the features of print – to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual children whose formal instruction was in French, a different language than they spoke at home, followed from senior kindergarten to Grade 1. Linear regression analyses showed that early print knowledge in both English and French significantly predicted French word reading in Grade 1; no such relations emerged to English word reading. Analyses included control measures of parental education and English vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and autoregressive controls of earlier word reading. These results suggest that print knowledge can be used to predict progress in second language word reading in emergent bilingual children.