Contributions of Oral Language Skills and Academic Knowledge to Early Elementary Students’ Classroom Word Learning and Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary and knowledge are important to literacy development. This paper investigates aspects of each that contribute to learning new words in the early elementary classroom and to reading comprehension. First- and second-grade students (N = 137) partook in classroom vocabulary instruction and completed measures of language skills. Second-grade students (n = 71) also completed measures of academic knowledge and reading. Multilevel modeling showed that vocabulary and grammatical awareness each contributed unique variance to word learning, with grammatical awareness more strongly predictive for first- than for second-grade students. Academic knowledge explained unique variance in second-grade students’ word learning and comprehension. Prior language and academic knowledge facilitate classroom word learning, and general academic knowledge contributes to general reading comprehension as early as second grade. Findings underscore the need for further explication of the roles and interactions of different sources of language and knowledge in theories of literacy development.