Programs Used for Literacy Partnership Pull-Out Sessions
Promoting Awareness in Speech Sounds (PASS) Description:
This is an evidenced-based program with demonstrated efficacy5,6 developed to enhance phonological awareness skills of preschool children with speech and language impairments. The goal of PASS is to teach spontaneous production of rhyme words, sound blending, and sound segmentation. The PASS program provides explicit, intensive instruction of long duration in 3 independent training modules: Rhyming, Blending, and Segmentation, which are implemented in conjunction with a multi-sensory approach to teaching the alphabetic principle. Each instructional module consists of a set of objectives and lessons that are developmentally sequenced, beginning with rhyming, an early phonological awareness skill, and moving to sound blending and sound segmentation. This hierarchy of instructional objectives has instructional validity16,17.
There are two instructional objectives in each training module (i.e., recognition and production). All lessons contain three parts: a warm-up activity, an explicit training segment, and a cool-down activity. This format permits children to begin and end a lesson with easy and fun activities, an important aspect of effective instructional planning18. The warm-up and cool-down activities include games, songs, and children’s literature that emphasize the corresponding skill areas and serve to reinforce skills acquired in previous lessons. PASS includes 20 instructional stimuli per lesson and a requirement for mastery of 80% accuracy over two sessions. A number of strategies will be used to facilitate children’s progress through the intervention program: participants will be required to name pictured stimuli in a lesson before instruction to minimize the effects of vocabulary knowledge on performance; instructors will exaggerate the articulatory volume and duration of the stimuli (e.g., the rime portion); instructors will explain and model task demands and target behaviors; target-specific feedback and error corrections will be provided for every response; participants will be rewarded for their attentive participation throughout instruction; and choral responding will be used in small group instruction to ensure participation of all children.
PASS intervention will be conducted in small groups (3-4 children) or individually in 30-minute sessions three times per week. Intervention will be delivered by trained SLPs. A probe task will be administered to every child before treatment begins and after completion of each instructional module. The 10-minute probe requires children to generate rhyming words, isolate and sequence phonemes, and blend phonemes into words. Percent accuracy and, for the sound blending and sound segmentation probes, number of phonemes preserved will be calculated to provide a more sensitive measure of progress than norm-referenced tests.
Vocabulary Enhancements (VE) Description:
In Tiers 2 and 3, SLPs will scaffold word knowledge, world knowledge, and concept development. The goal of VEs is to help the children become independent word learners by supporting vocabulary and concept development introduced in CCP. It also will promote narrative discourse and increased verbal reasoning. Its instructional scope includes: repeated exposure to new vocabulary (both common and rare words), definitional elaboration, pictorial semantic and story maps, facilitating depth of word knowledge (i.e., slow and fast mapping), fostering meaningful question-response discourse patterns, and categorization and classification of new vocabulary (i.e., teaching central and peripheral instances and non-instances as well as relationships between words)19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. All instructional strategies will focus on the topics/theme introduced in CCP. Each theme will be presented over a 4-week period and integrate vocabulary from previous lessons to reinforce definitional meaning and increase children’s depth of word and world knowledge.
Topics are taught in 30-minute lessons using pre-selected target vocabulary and concepts. Each lesson employs a multi-sensory approach and has two parts: book reading and an authentic activity involving the following sequence of instruction: (a) Selected storybooks are read and reread throughout a week using the PEER scaffolding technique; (b) On the first day, book reading will reinforce the inside-out skills that are currently being taught in the classroom. For example, “A frog lives in a bog. What is the first sound you hear in the word b-b-b-bog”; (c) On remaining weekdays, the CROWD strategy will be used throughout the book reading (5 types of questions, serving a different instructional function); (d) Instructional strategies will be implemented to teach and strengthen new vocabulary including semantic mapping, concept laddering, or four-square concept development. (e) Systematic, scaffolded opportunities will occur to practice newly learned vocabulary in authentic contexts such as pretend play and dialogue (e.g., pretending to be a leaping frog in a bog; describing how a frog’s dwelling is the same and different from a dragonfly’s; re-enacting the story). These practice activities also foster conversational development, the concept of “story”, and verbal reasoning skills. In Tier 3, VE activities will occur in the same general sequence, but will increase in intensity and degree of differentiated instruction.
