Educators and researchers agree that oral language is fundamental to students' reading acquisition. It is not clear how best to conceptualise oral language within models of reading – as one's overall understanding of spoken language, or as individual skills, each with unique contributions to children's reading comprehension. In our longitudinal study of children in Grades 2 and 3, we examined the unique contributions of three oral language skills – vocabulary, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness – to gains in reading comprehension assessed later that academic year (N = 116) and in the spring of the following academic year (N = 87). In our most conservative analyses, we controlled for children's listening comprehension in addition to prior reading achievement. Each language skill predicted variance in later reading comprehension beyond that accounted for by initial word reading and reading comprehension. In analyses with listening comprehension also controlled, each of syntactic awareness and morphological awareness retained their predictive power. Morphological awareness emerged as the most robust predictor and was associated with greater increases in reading comprehension for students in third versus second grade. Results support theoretical models that identify and differentiate contributions from individual oral language skills to reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that increasing each of these oral language skills within the elementary classroom may lead to advances in children's reading comprehension.

中文翻译：

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描述口语对阅读理解的贡献的最佳方式是什么：听力理解还是个人口语技能？

教育工作者和研究人员一致认为，口语是学生阅读习得的基础。目前尚不清楚如何在阅读模型中最好地将口语概念化——作为一个人对口语的整体理解，或作为个人技能，每种技能对儿童的阅读理解都有独特的贡献。在我们对 2 年级和 3 年级儿童的纵向研究中，我们研究了三种口语技能——词汇、句法意识和形态意识——对提高阅读理解能力的独特贡献，在该学年晚些时候 ( N  = 116) 和下一学年春季（N = 87）。在我们最保守的分析中，除了先前的阅读成绩外，我们还控制了儿童的听力理解能力。除了最初的单词阅读和阅读理解所解释的之外，每种语言技能都预测了后期阅读理解的差异。在听力理解也受控制的分析中，每个句法意识和形态意识都保留了它们的预测能力。形态意识成为最有力的预测因素，并且与三年级和二年级学生的阅读理解能力的提高有关。结果支持识别和区分个人口语技能对阅读理解的贡献的理论模型。