Most reading disabilities can be traced to difficulties acquiring oral language during preschool years due to insufficient linguistic stimulation. The present 2-year project aimed to improve the literacy-related oral language skills of 48 low-income, primarily ELL 4-year-old children in local public preschool by providing for individual conversational experiences with trained university students. Their results were compared to 48 peers at two comparable preschools. Children were tested in the fall and spring on multiple measures. Throughout the year, intervention children met with volunteers each week (26 weeks) for 20 minutes to dictate personal narratives. The control group received the regular public school preschool curriculum only. The improvement of intervention children on multiple measures of oral language ability—notably vocabulary and quality of narrative—was significantly greater than that of their peers.
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