JCPSLP July 2014_Vol16_no2

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

SPAT-R

RAPT Boehm-3 Letter ID SPAT-R Story retell & comprehension

RAPT Boehm-3 Letter ID

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).

60

JCPSLP Volume 16, Number 2 2014

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology