Associations between Preschool Reading Related Skills and later Reading Achievement

Abstract

This paper is about the extent of children's reading related knowledge and associations with reading achievement at seven years. It presents results, from a major longitudinal study of children's progress in 33 Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) infant schools, on six measures of preschool reading related knowledge—word matching, concepts about print, letter identification, word reading, handwriting, and oral vocabulary—and their associations with Young's Group Reading scores at seven years. The strongest association was between letter identification and reading at seven. Preschool oral vocabulary and handwriting were also significantly and independently related to reading at seven, though concepts about print, in contrast to other recent research, was no more related to later reading than was word matching. Results are set in the context of conflicting theories about the early teaching of reading and, in particular, about conflicting views on the extent of preschool reading related skills and which skills have the most relevance to later reading achievement.