by Ying Ying Liu

Introduction

Literacy is an important and complex ability for educational achievement across age groups.^{13,17,21,22,28} As early as in the first and second grades, children acquire skills related to decoding (sounding out and recognizing written words), spelling and composition (writing words and sentences correctly), reading comprehension (understanding the meaning of what is read), and reading fluency (reading quickly without mistakes).^{2,3,5,7,17,26,27} Research shows that girls often outperform boys in terms of general literacy as assessed in terms of data from national standardized tests^2,7 across age groups. Girls also show better performance in spelling, vocabulary use, as well as compositional organization and fluency.^2,7 In addition, reading diagnostic tests also reveal that boys also tend to have higher rates of dyslexia.^11,5 However, the reasons leading to this persistent gender gap in reading and writing achievement remain ambiguous.

Subject 

Research has shown that the most important precursors to the acquisition of literacy skills are in the oral language domain and in the code-related domain.²⁹ Particularly, preschool vocabulary (oral language domain; comprehension and verbal), letter knowledge (code-related domain; letter-sound correspondences, letter recognition/writing) and phonological awareness (code-related domain; especially implicit phonological awareness of rime and alliteration) skills, which constitute the building blocks for literacy acquisition, are strongly correlated with actual literacy related performance in later grades.²⁹ In addition, these skills are not all acquired in the same manner. Skills such as vocabulary and letter knowledge are highly dependent on environmental factors^24,30 and need explicit instruction while phonological skills seem to be genetic and developmental.^8,23

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