A study of the effectiveness of a small‐group intervention on the vocabulary and narrative development of at‐risk kindergarten children

This study investigated the effect of a small-group storybook-based intervention on kindergarten students’ vocabulary and narrative development, which is important to later reading achievement. Twenty-eight kindergarten children from a high-poverty urban school, all significantly behind their peers on standardized measures of language development (semantic and syntactic) and narrative (understanding and production), were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention students engaged in three 30-minute storybook-based lessons per week for 12 weeks, focused on vocabulary and narrative development. The intervention students made greater gains on both standardized and nonstandardized measures of vocabulary and narrative achievement than did control-group children. A recent study by Hair, Halle, Terry-Humen, Lavelle, and Calkins (2006) of 17,219 kindergarten students from across the country (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten) found that nearly one-fourth of all kindergarteners enter school with poor language skills. The researchers noted that this “risk” profile was a profile disproportionally carried by children of poverty. It is quite clear from the research that there is a strong relationship between children's language development when they begin school and their later reading comprehension (Catts, Bridges, Little, & Tomblin, 2008; Dickinson & Tabors, 2001; NICHD, 2005; Scarborough, 2003; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). While we have come a long way in helping children get off to a good start as readers, the focus of attention to the ultimate goal of reading, comprehension, has been limited to reading-comprehension strategies. Strategies alone are not enough for students without the strong base in aspects of language development that impacts later reading comprehension. Addressing the need to investigate ways teachers can support such aspects of language development, this article will report and discuss findings of a study of the effectiveness of a small-group, language-focused intervention on the vocabulary and narrative development of high-poverty, urban kindergarten children who were significantly behind their peers on standardized measures of language development. This study is important, because while high-quality instruction in the basics of reading (phonemic awareness, letter identification, word-recognition strategies) is essential to supporting students’ initial success as readers, it is not adequate for the long-term reading achievement success of children of poverty (Tabors, Snow, & Dickinson, 2001).