Phonological Intervention within Storybook Reading

Abstract

Preschool children who are exhibiting delayed phonological development are most often in need of intervention for a wide range of oral and written language abilities. Rather than addressing each goal with individual activities, functional approaches would seek to use oral language scaffolding techniques within genuine communicative contexts to improve simultaneously a range of language abilities. The functional approach to phonological intervention described here uses storybook reading as a communicative context. Goals are set to develop the children's organization of more complex discourse structure and semantic complexity of the utterances within the narratives. Syntactic, morphological, and phonological parts of these whole narratives are refined through the modeling, expansions, and expatiations that are used within the oral scaffolding cycles.