Where do I begin to read? Concepts about print support early L1 and L2 word reading in emerging bilingual readers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before children learn to read, they develop an understanding of how books, words, and letters work, also known as concepts about print. This is an established correlate of word reading skills. A key remaining question is whether concepts about print predict word reading among learners schooled in a language other than the home language. In this longitudinal study with 95 emerging bilingual children followed from kindergarten to Grade 1, we tested whether concepts about print assessed in kindergarten in English (the home language) predicted word reading concurrently and/or longitudinally in English and French (the language of instruction in school) after controlling for nonverbal reasoning, parental education level, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness. We found that kindergarten English concepts about print contributed to significant variance in English and French word reading both concurrently and longitudinally. These results suggest that concepts about print acquired in the home language may enable word reading skills in the language of school instruction among emerging bilingual readers. They align with the emergent literacy perspective that conceptualizes early literacy skills as foundational to the acquisition of conventional forms of literacy, including literacy acquired in an additional language.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".