Sample A: Cover Page of Thesis, Project, or Dissertation Proposal

1. Introduction
Improving both literacy and social-emotional skills has become a focus of recent
intervention research. Emergent literacy research has acknowledged the importance of
literacy intervention efforts aiming to improve children‘s academic and social-emotional
environments (Pianta, 2006), and research in the social-emotional realm has linked
children‘s verbal abilities and social-emotional development (i.e., emotion knowledge
and positive emotion regulation; Miller et al., 2006). Current programs aiming to enhance
both children‘s literacy and social-emotional skills take a comprehensive approach to
program curricula (see Committee for Children, 2006; Evangelou & Sylva, 2007;
Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, n.d.) that is not always feasible
to implement. Effective and resource-efficient intervention methods enhancing both
children‘s emergent literacy and social-emotional skills could provide positive
developmental outcomes for larger numbers of children, and particularly children at risk
for poor literacy (Britto, 2001; Hoff, 2003) and social-emotional outcomes (McLoyd,
1990; Yeung, Linver, & Brooks-Gunn, 2002) due to socio-economic hardship.
By replicating methods previously implemented by Whitehurst et al. (1994,
1999), the proposed research introduces intervention methods aiming to simultaneously
enhance the development of preschool-aged children‘s vocabulary skills, one of the three
key predictors of literacy acquisition (Lonigan, 2006), and the development of preschool-
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