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

school-aged years. Demonstrating continuous relations between children‘s family
environments and literacy skills, maternal education was correlated with children‘s
preschool- and school-age literacy skills. Further, mothers who engaged their children in
high-quality literacy interactions, including the use of interaction and teaching children
during book reading, had preschool-aged children who demonstrated greater school
readiness and expressive vocabularies (Britto, 2001).
In summary, providing children from families facing socio-economic hardship
with preschool instruction enhancing language and key emergent literacy skills is crucial
for bettering their long-term literacy outcomes. Children‘s literacy environments have
great potential to influence literacy skill development (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), and
qualitative differences have been noted in the language and literacy home environments
of children in high, medium (Hoff, 2003), and low socio-economic status (Britto, 2001).
Of particular concern is the knowledge that socio-economically disadvantaged children
have been shown to live in environments offering less support for language and literacy
development (Britto, 2001). The knowledge gap can be reduced through the use of early,
high-quality instruction of both skill development and conceptual knowledge (Neuman,
2006). In particular, vocabulary development of children from families of low socio-
economic status should benefit from enriched language experiences (Hoff, 2003).
Literacy Development: The Roles of Preschool Programming and Teachers
The enhancement of children‘s literacy skills begins long before kindergarten
entry (Lonigan, 2006; Morrison et al., 2006); thus, the preschool classroom context
provides a pristine opportunity to serve this purpose. Both children‘s individual language
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