查看文章

The relationship between early childhood skills and second-grade reading ability is of substantial developmental and policy import. This chapter explores the nature of that presumably cumulative relationship, in that stronger skills in preschool beget stronger skills in elementary school; the chapter goes on to describe the association between four-and five-year-old children from the Un Buen Comienzo (UBC) study in Chile and their second-grade standardized reading test scores (SIMCE), controlling for family background characteristics. We found that children’s preschool-age vocabulary, early reading, and early math skills positively predicted second-grade reading scores. Self-regulation and low problem behavior as well as inhibitory control positively predicted later reading test scores. Other socioemotional and executive function variables, such as attention, pro-social behavior, and positive behavior did not predict reading scores in these analyses, similar to the results from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the Duncan et al.(2007) study. The influence of other developmental domains such as socioemotional development, early mathematics, and self-regulation skills on later literacy development is important to study, and the originality of this research in Spanish monolinguals is important to highlight as a contribution to the field. This chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of this work for practice, contributing to an “educationally informed theory of language learning”. Early childhood development across a range of domains, in particular language and literacy development, form a basis for further development in …