The Impact of Embedded Language Strategies on an Untrained Adult’s Implementation Fidelity During Shared Reading Tasks

Implementation science aims to lessen the divide between current research and use of evidence-based practices. In the field of special education, a commonly used evidence-based practice to promote language and literacy development in young children is shared reading. An integral component of shared reading is the adult’s use of specific language-enhancing strategies embedded in the reading interaction with the child. Although there are several language strategies that could be integrated into shared reading, this study focused on verbal modeling, expanding/extending child’s utterances, commenting, asking questions, and providing wait time. An implementation framework approach was used to determine if the adult’s use of these strategies during shared reading tasks can be enhanced (i.e. implementation fidelity) by providing written instructions embedded in the story books read to children. Implementation fidelity is measured by analyzing the participant’s quantity and quality of intervention (i.e. use of language strategies). A repeated measures pretest posttest experimental research design was used to measure the difference in the participants’ use of strategies with the provision of language tips (post-test) and without language tips (pretest) during a 2 minute, 30 second representative sample taken pre and during treatment. The quantity of language strategies was measured using a frequency count of total number of strategies used across both phases. Quality of implementation fidelity was measured by calculating the percentage of total types of language strategies used during the session. Raw data were analyzed using SPSS through a paired samples t-test to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the quantity of language strategies used (RQ #1) and the quality of language strategies used (RQ #2) pre and post intervention. Additionally, to address the research-to-practice gap, a secondary aim of this study was to identify a method of training caregivers to implement an evidence-based language intervention with fidelity using a low-cost, effective strategy that may potentially overcome some of the potential barriers to implementation.