Skills that predict reading in Korean primary school children at year 2

The present study explored the relationship between reading comprehension and the following predictors: vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN). It is acknowledged that decoding skills exert an important influence in early reading while language skills take its place in later stages. However, the majority of studies on the predictors of reading comprehension have focused on children learning to read English, a deep orthography. Accumulated evidence on the development of reading comprehension in orthographies other than English suggest that underpinning reading skills may develop at a different pace for children learning to read Korean, a language with a highly transparent orthography and unique alphabet. Forty-eight children in Year 2 were sampled from three schools in the suburbs of Taegu, South Korea. The children were assessed on reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Nonverbal intelligence and age in months were used as a covariate. It was hypothesized that if results of the data analyses showed vocabulary to be as important, or more important, than phonological awareness in predicting reading comprehension, it would suggest that decoding skills are reaching a ceiling and language skills are starting to exert an important influence on reading comprehension for the Korean children. Results of the multiple regression analyses showed that vocabulary and phonological awareness had an equal effect in predicting reading comprehension scores, respectively explaining 15.8% and 13.3% of added variance after nonverbal intelligence and age in months had been controlled for. Rapid automatized naming did not have a significant predictive effect on reading comprehension with any of the statistical models. The findings support the emergence of oral language skills as an important determinant of early reading comprehension in Korean. The equal importance of phonological awareness suggests that phonological principles are of universal importance for early reading, regardless of the simplicity of the orthography. The findings of the effect of RAN added to the discrepancies in the literature.