Description:
<jats:p>Research suggests children beginning school around age five years show similar long-term reading achievement as children who start later, at seven years. To shed light on this phenomenon, this article presents cross-sectional data examining the oral narrative, phonemic awareness and non-word decoding skills of three groups of children at the beginning of state schooling (age 5), the beginning of Waldorf schooling (age 7) and children who attended state schooling, but were of a similar age to the Waldorf sample (age 7) ( N = 103). Key covariates of receptive vocabulary, home literacy environment, sex, ethnicity and maternal education were included. Analyses suggested language development – including story memory and narrative quality and phoneme awareness – improved with age but not length of formal schooling. Conversely, non-word decoding skills improved with formal schooling, but not age. These findings add to the literature supporting separate skill clusters of language and decoding skills, with potentially different contributors to their development.</jats:p>