British Journal of Educational Studies, ISSN 0007-1005 DOI number: 10.1111/j.1467-8527.2006.00341.x Vol. 54, No. 2, June 2006, pp 189–211 189 © 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 SES. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. SOCIOCULTURAL VARIATION IN LITERACY ACHIEVEMENT by LUDO VERHOEVEN, Radboud University Nijmegen and ANNE VERMEER, Tilburg University ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to describe the variations in literacy achievement among native and non-native upper primary school children (grades three to six) in the Netherlands. Various measures of word decoding, reading literacy and writing skill were collected from 1091 native Dutch children, 753 children with a former Dutch colonial background and 580 children with a Mediterranean background. The results showed the non-native children to lag behind their native peers on all of the tasks, although the differences on the decoding and writing tasks were fairly small. The Mediterranean children scored significantly lower than the ex-colonial children on all of the reading literacy tasks but equally high on the decoding and writing tasks. For both the native and non-native children, the same underlying factor structure was found to characterise their literacy achievement. Grade and ethnic status con- sistently predicted the factor scores for Word Decoding, Reading Literacy and Text Writing. In addition, socio-economic status (SES) predicted Reading Literacy and the variable sex predicted Writing Skills. Keywords: literacy, sociocultural variation, the Netherlands, decoding, writing skills, psycholinguistics 1. INTRODUCTION Considerable variation exits in both the distribution and degree of literacy across countries, and the consequences of being illiterate for one’s personal life are increasingly being recognised. It is also being recognised that literacy is not a single monolithic entity but, rather, a complex of reading and writing skills. And one critical question is what the basic psycholinguistic abilities underlying the individual achievement of literacy may be. The abilities to code and decode written text constitute the basic technical aspect of literacy (cf. Perfetti, 1998). That is, once children