The Roles of Oral Language and Knowledge Development in Supporting Text Comprehension for Young Children

In this chapter, we consider what we know about the integration of language and knowledge development in the early childhood years, with a focus on instruction for children in preschool through grade 2. We consider how oral language and knowledge development relate to concurrent listening comprehension as well as long-term reading comprehension for children. We begin by reviewing theory and instructional research on oral language and knowledge development independently as they relate to text comprehension. We then consider what we know about leveraging knowledge development to support language development and text comprehension, as well as what we still need to learn about instruction that may impact these important domains for early literacy development.