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

skills. The model includes four key components of early literacy leading to reading
abilities: language skills, writing skills, linguistic awareness, and print concepts. The
model depicts preschool learning activities, including shared reading activities and
knowledge of sounds and letters, leading to children‘s emergent literacy abilities, which
subsequently lead to reading, including the abilities to decode and comprehend text.
A recurrent theme within previous research implicates oral language,
phonological processing skills, and print knowledge as key predictors of children‘s
literacy acquisition from kindergarten through the early primary grades (Lonigan, 2006).
Oral language denotes the capacity and use of children‘s vocabularies in every-day
communication and reflects Beard‘s (2003) top-down skills and Whitehurst and
Lonigan‘s (1998) outside-in units. Phonological processing skills reflect the sound of
language and its use in cognitive processing, and print knowledge reflects knowledge of
the basic functions of print (Lonigan, 2006). Both skill sets reflect Beard‘s (2003)
bottom-up skills and Whitehurst and Lonigan‘s (1998) inside-out units.
Just as differing models of emergent literacy implicate a number of skills,
relations between key literacy skills have also been demonstrated. Specifically regarding
children‘s language skills, Senechal, Ouellette, and Rodney (2006) reported that
individual differences in children‘s oral vocabulary skills were predictive of reading
comprehension and also influenced children‘s reading abilities through relations with
phonological awareness and listening comprehension. After reanalyzing archival data
from previous research, they found that children‘s kindergarten vocabularies predicted
reading comprehension in grade 3 and in grade 4 when controlling for grade 4 reading
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