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

In addition to enhancing emergent literacy, previous research provides evidence
suggesting dialogic reading‘s usefulness in enhancing social skills. To investigate
dialogic reading‘s effects on children‘s use of evaluative devices in narrative,
Zevenbergen, Whitehurst, and Zevenbergen (2003) implemented a dialogic reading
intervention in children‘s classrooms and homes. Evaluative information includes explicit
inferences about a storybook character‘s state of mind or emotional state, quotes of
storybook characters‘ speech, comments qualifying or emphasizing storybook content
(e.g., ―He never listened.‖), and comments reflecting one‘s own emotional reactions to
storybook content (Peterson & McCabe, 1983, as cited in Zevenbergen et al., 2003). Over
a period of 30 weeks, Head Start teachers in both full- and half-day classrooms read
storybooks using dialogic reading techniques with groups of three to five children three
times per week; and parents were encouraged to use dialogic reading techniques with
their children in reading at home at least three times per week. Children also participated
in a 16-week phonemic awareness program in their classrooms. Results indicated that
children participating in the intervention made more references to internal states of
storybook characters and had greater expressive language skills when compared to
children in the control group. These findings illustrate dialogic reading techniques‘ uses
in improving children‘s emergent literacy and social cognitive development across full-
and half-day Head Start classrooms and suggest potential uses of dialogic reading in
simultaneously enhancing children‘s literacy and social-emotional development.
In sum, previous research has theoretically and empirically linked children‘s
literacy and social-emotional skills, and recent intervention research has taken a
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