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ABSTRACT: This article, the first of a two-part series, provides background information and a general description of an emergent literacy intervention model for at-risk preschoolers and kindergartners. The embedded-explicit intervention model emphasizes the dual importance of providing young children with socially embedded opportunities for meaningful, naturalistic literacy experiences throughout the day, in addition to regular structured therapeutic interactions that explicitly target critical emergent literacy goals. The role of the speech-language pathologist (SLP) in the embedded-explicit model encompasses both indirect and direct service delivery: The SLP consults and collaborates with teachers and parents to ensure the highest quality and quantity of socially embedded literacy-focused experiences and serves as a direct provider of explicit interventions using structured curricula and/or lesson plans. The goal of this integrated model is to provide comprehensive emergent literacy interventions across a spectrum of early literacy skills to ensure the successful transition of at-risk children from prereaders to readers.
KEY WORDS: emergent literacy, literacy, preschoolers, intervention, educational services
By viewing reading as essentially a complex higher order linguistic skill, and recognizing that many reading disabilities reflect an underlying deficit in language processes and/or knowledge, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have an indispensable role to serve in preventing and ameliorating reading disabilities. Primary prevention activities-that is, arresting reading problems before they are able to manifest-focus on enhancing emergent literacy development for young children who are vulnerable for later reading problems. This article, the first in a two-part series, presents a clinically oriented preventive framework for conceptualizing the delivery of emergent literacy interventions for young at-risk children. The framework is termed the embedded-explicit model of emergent literacy intervention.
The embedded-explicit model is designed to guide the SLP v/ho works with preschool and/or kindergarten children who are exhibiting difficulties in developing a strong literacy foundation, as suggested by early literacy screen-ing, parental report, clinical observation, or the presence of specific individual risk factors (Justice, Invernizzi, & Meier, 2002). The model emphasizes the use of multitiered intervention for ensuring at-risk children's attainment of critical emergent literacy skills to promote their successful transition from prereaders to readers. The term "at-risk" is used in this article to collectively describe those children who are developing emergent literacy skills more slowly than their peers, and are therefore susceptible for later reading difficulties....