Project: First Grade MTSS Academic Language Instruction

Early language skills are critical to students’ later reading comprehension and writing. As they progress through school, the complexity of language they need to understand and use increases, suggesting that young children can leverage oral language resources to acquire literacy and knowledge. Although structured literacy applies to language comprehension just as it does to word reading, there is a dearth of research investigating explicit, systematic, and cumulative approaches to language instruction. In a hybrid efficacy-implementation study, school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs), first-grade teachers, and researchers formed a researcher-practitioner partnership to investigate the efficacy and implementation of Tier 1 and Tier 2 academic language instruction for one year using the Story Champs Curriculum on the language, reading, and writing skills of 155 first graders who scored below the expected listening comprehension benchmark. We report the efficacy results of the hybrid study in this article and address the implementation research questions in another article (Spencer et al., 2025). In a cluster randomized waitlist controlled trial design, participants’ language, reading, and writing skills were assessed at pretest, posttest, and follow-up timepoints. Results indicate that, compared to students who received their business-as-usual instruction, students who received the multitiered academic language instruction showed improved oral narrative retelling, inferential word learning, narrative writing, and expository retelling skills at posttest (ES = 0.30-2.64) and follow-up (ES = 0.22-2.15). At follow-up, effect were observed for norm-referenced, standardized tests of listening comprehension (ES = 0.63) and reading comprehension (ES = 0.997).