In this 1-year longitudinal study, we examined the central component processes of reading fluency, spelling accuracy, reading comprehension, and narrative text writing skills of 103 Turkish Cypriot children. Two cohorts of children from 2nd and 4th grades were followed into 3rd and 5th grades, respectively. The testing battery included the measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), vocabulary, listening comprehension, and working memory. In line with previous research evidence from other transparent orthographies, such as German (Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002), we have also found that whereas phonological awareness was the strongest predictor of spelling, RAN was a powerful predictor of reading fluency. The overall pattern of relationships were broadly in line with the models of reading comprehension and writing in English and further highlighted the central role of oral language skills in children's comprehension and writing. The results have also underscored the complexity of the relationships between reading fluency and reading comprehension and likewise between transcription skills and writing quality. Finally, it has become clear from the findings that there is a need for an integrated and comprehensive approach to the study of reading comprehension and writing. Taken together, the overall results suggested that alongside many similarities, there are distinct differences in the ways in which different component processes are related to different literacy skills that can be further influenced by the nature of the input language and orthography.

The study examined: (a) the role of phonological, grammatical, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills in reading and spelling development; and (b) the component processes of early narrative writing skills. Fifty-seven Turkish-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. RAN was the most powerful longitudinal predictor of reading speed and its effect was evident even when previous reading skills were taken into account. Broadly, the phonological and grammatical skills made reliable contributions to spelling performance but their effects were completely mediated by previous spelling skills. Different aspects of the narrative writing skills were related to different processing skills. While handwriting speed predicted writing fluency, spelling accuracy predicted spelling error rate. Vocabulary and working memory were the only reliable longitudinal predictors of the quality of composition content. The overall model, however, failed to explain any reliable variance in the structural quality of the compositions. Likewise, our current understanding of the component processes of early narrative writing skills in consistent orthographies is very limited. Three central processing skills have been identified to underlie the early composition writing skills of children. These are the transcription (e.g., handwriting and spelling), verbal memory (e.g., short term memory and working memory), and text generation (e.g., oral language skills such as grammar and vocabulary) (Berninger, 1999;McCutchen, 2000). However, as the research evidence almost 4 exclusively comes from studies conducted in English, we do not know the relative importance of these processing skills in consistent writing systems.The present study seeks to address these issues and has two primary aims. First, to investigate the relative role of grammatical awareness, phonological awareness, and RAN in reading and spelling; second, to investigate the role of the three central component processes

UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited.UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights.UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT.Copyright © 2012 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2012.01538.x Volume 00, Issue 00, 2012 The role of oral language skills in reading and listening comprehension of text: a comparison of monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) speakers of English language Selma Babayigi t Department of P sychology, University of t he West of England, Bristol, UK Journal of Research inThe study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text comprehension, but the two groups performed at comparable levels on word-reading accuracy and speed. Oral language, indexed by vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills, emerged as the most powerful unique predictor of both reading and listening comprehension levels. Although there was a tendency of oral language to be more strongly related to L2 reading comprehension, its relationship with listening comprehension was comparable across the two language groups. Finally, individual differences in oral language skills emerged as the primary factor that explained the language group differences in text comprehension levels. Educational implications of these fi ndings were discussed.

The role of preschool phonological awareness in early reading and spelling skills was investigated in the transparent orthography of Turkish. Fifty‐six preschool children (mean age=5.6 years) were followed into Grade 2 (mean age=7.6 years). While preschool phonological awareness failed to make any reliable contribution to future reading skills, it was the strongest longitudinal correlate of spelling skills measured at the end of Grades 1 and 2. Overall findings suggested that phonological awareness may be differentially related to reading and spelling, and that spelling is a more sensitive index of phonological processing skills. In this study, verbal short‐term memory emerged as the most powerful and consistent longitudinal correlate of reading speed. This finding raised important questions about the component processes of reading speed, and the role of memory and morphosyntactic skills in an agglutinative and transparent orthography such as Turkish.