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JCPSLP
Volume 16, Number 2 2014
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
Intervention
The intervention program was developed in consultation
with school staff and administered by the school-based
speech-language pathologist as well as classroom teachers
and teacher aides.
Prep Class 1 (PC1) and Prep Class 2 (PC2) adhered to the
regular literacy curriculum, that is, whole-class phonological
awareness sessions targeting syllables, rhyme, first and last
sound identification, blending, and segmenting. To assist
implementation of whole-class instruction, teachers were
encouraged to use whole body activities and electronic
resources such as
A Sound Way
(Love & Reilly, 2009).
Letter sound knowledge instruction utilised the
Jolly
Phonics
(Lloyd, 1992) approach. In addition, one group of
four children received oral language sessions (once a week)
facilitated by one of the trained teacher aides. Children in
this group were identified by the teachers as needing extra
oral language input. These sessions focused on general
oral language skills, were not book-based, and were not
related to the classroom curriculum.
Prep Class 3 (PC3) received 15 weeks of targeted
intervention (during term 3 and term 4), in addition to their
regular literacy classroom curriculum, four times a week:
one whole-class (30 minute) session, followed by small-
group sessions (30 minutes) delivered by the speech-
language pathologist, teachers, and teacher aides. This
class was selected by the principal after discussions with
the classroom teachers. The program incorporated several
evidence-based strategies, as highlighted by Hattie (2009),
including small-group learning, direct instruction, and
phonics and vocabulary instruction, as well as professional
development of teaching staff involved in the project.
The content of the book-based intervention was based
on current evidence supporting the inclusion of the
following key areas of emergent literacy: vocabulary (Justice
et al., 2005), phonological awareness (Gillon, 2004), story
grammar (Spencer & Slocum, 2010), and oral language
(syntax and morphology; Justice et al., 2008). Each target
book was used for a two-week period. Each target area
(phonological awareness, story grammar, vocabulary and
syntax) was the focus of one whole class and one small-
group session a week. The Appendix shows an example of
a weekly plan. Prior to implementing the program, teacher
aides attended a one-hour training session facilitated
by the speech-language pathologist. The teacher-aide
training session outlined the logistics of the program,
discussed target areas, and allocated time to hands-
on exposure to target resources. All teachers attended
training as per scheduled whole-school professional
development sessions. These sessions included more
general information surrounding whole-class instruction of
phonological awareness, vocabulary, and syntax.
Reliability
All story retelling samples were recorded, transcribed,
coded, and scored by an independent research assistant.
The second author subsequently checked all the stories for
transcription and/or coding errors and made corrections
where needed. Children’s responses to the RAPT and the
story comprehension were recorded verbatim and stored
by the students immediately following the test
administration. The first author checked all the scoring and
made corrections when needed.
Data analysis
For all standardised test results, standard scores or
percentile scores were calculated for descriptive purposes;
total raw scores were used for analysis to provide a more
•
The Boehm Test of Basic Concepts
, 3rd edition (Boehm,
2001). This standardised test assesses understanding of
basic concepts.
•
Letter identification. The class teacher assessed the
students’ knowledge of letters in week 1 of term 1,
using a checklist as per normal school procedures.
Table 2. Assessment and intervention timeline
Time
Term 1
Weeks 1 & 2
Term 2
Week 9
Term 3 Term 4
Weeks 8 & 9
Inter
vention
PC3 Intervention for 15
weeks
Tests
RAPT
Boehm-3
Letter ID
SPAT-R
RAPT
Boehm-3
Letter ID
SPAT-R
Story retell &
comprehension
Note: RAPT: Renfrew Action Picture Test (Renfrew, 2010); Boehm-3:
Boehm Test of Basic Concepts – 3 (Boehm, 2001); SPAT-R:
Sutherland Phonological Awareness Test – Revised (Neilson, 2003).
Prior to the intervention, midway through the school
year (as per the test manual), the
Sutherland Phonological
Awareness Test – Revised
(SPAT-R; Neilson, 2003)
was administered to assess the students’ phonological
awareness skills. The SPAT-R is a standardised test of
phonological awareness at syllable, onset-rime, and
phoneme levels, designed for students attending the first to
the fourth year of schooling.
At the end of the school year, all students were assessed
by four Master of Speech Pathology students from Griffith
University, under supervision of the first author. These students
attended a training day in administering the assessments,
which consisted of an assessment demonstration and
provided the students with the opportunity to administer the
assessment battery under direct observation. Daily debrief
meetings were held to discuss performance. All
assessment sessions were audio-recorded.
In addition to the tasks described above, other
assessments were administered. To assess story retelling
and comprehension the Profile of Oral Narrative Ability
(Westerveld, Gillon, & Boyd, 2012) was used. This task
requires the child to listen to a novel story
Ana gets
Lost
(Swan, 1992). After the first exposure, the child is
asked eight comprehension questions, yielding a story
comprehension score (SC); following the second exposure,
the child is asked to retell the story. Story retelling samples
were audio-recorded using digital voice recorders and
transcribed verbatim using Systematic Analysis of
Language Transcripts – New Zealand version (SALT-NZ;
Miller, Gillon, & Westerveld, 2012) coding conventions. The
following measures were generated automatically using
SALT-NZ: grammatical accuracy (GA: % grammatically
accurate utterances), verbal productivity (length of the
sample in number of utterances), and semantic diversity
(NDW: number of different words). Stories were scored at
macrostructure level on story quality (SQ), which measures
the child’s ability to provide a coherent story containing
story grammar elements of setting, characters, problem,
resolution, and conclusion. Full details regarding the scoring
procedures are described in Westerveld et al. (2012).
