Seminar Abstract
Reading and writing are often studied — and taught — as separate skills, yet a growing body of work shows they share a largely overlapping foundation of component skills and knowledge that is hierarchically organized, develops interactively, and shifts across development and orthographies. In this talk, I outline this view of reading (the Direct and Indirect Effects model of Reading, DIER) and writing (DIEW), and the evidence for treating reading and writing as related but dissociable skills. I then turn to a recent meta-analysis (Cao, Kim, & Wang, 2026, Journal of Educational Psychology) examining how socioeconomic status (SES) relates to reading and writing achievement. I discuss how the hierarchical and dynamic structure of reading and writing helps explain why SES disparities are not uniform across literacy subskills, and what this means for early identification and intervention. I close by inviting discussion of where this framework and dataset might intersect with ongoing work at Oslo.
About the Speaker
Young-Suk Kim is a professor at the School of Education, University of California at Irvine. Her scholarship focuses on understanding language and literacy development and effective instruction for children from diverse backgrounds.
Young-Suk Kim’s areas of research include reading comprehension, reading fluency, listening comprehension and oral language, dyslexia, higher-order cognitive skills, written composition, and reading-writing relations. She has worked extensively with monolingual children and multilingual children from various linguistic backgrounds.