Emergent Literacy (EL) encompasses the foundational early literacy related skills required for later formal literacy success. Given the importance of EL knowledge, establishing efforts to successfully enhance children’s EL development is an important avenue by which literacy outcomes for all New Zealand children may be improved. Parents play a critical role in the development of children’s EL knowledge and parent-led interventions have been identified as an important context for building children’s foundational skills. However, one limitation of parent-led EL approaches is relatively low intervention fidelity rates, which likely weakens children’s response to the intervention. In this thesis, a series of studies addressing the need to develop and trial a parent-led EL for the New Zealand context is presented, considering the impacts of various techniques designed to enhance fidelity in the delivery of the intervention.

The first study utilises a descriptive design to describe the EL skills, oral language skills, and Home Literacy Environments of 118 3- and 4-year-old children attending early childhood education centres in Aotearoa New Zealand. Analysis of the obtained results indicates a relative strength in oral language and some needs in printbased EL knowledge. Most children came from well-resourced HLE.

The second study explores the effectiveness of a new shared reading intervention, called Sit Together And Read New Zealand. A controlled pre-test/posttest research design was utilised to measure the impact of the 16-week intervention in supporting families to develop children’s EL skills and to strengthen their HLEs. The findings demonstrate that the intervention was effective in supporting the development of children’s CAP knowledge. This intervention effect was also observed for children with lower oral language levels within the sample. However, no effect was found with respect to the other measures. The impact of parental fidelity on the development of EL knowledge in children was also examined. The results showed that half of the parents implemented the programme with high levels of fidelity, while the remainder implemented it with a medium or low level of fidelity. The analysis indicated that there was no relationship between parental fidelity to the intervention and children’s outcomes in the PWPA (Justice & Ezell, 2001) assessment task.

The third study involves a comparison of the implementation fidelity of three behaviour modification conditions designed to support parents in overcoming potential existing barriers to implementing STAR-NZ with fidelity. Parents were randomly assigned to receive either weekly coaching, praise/feedback, a financial reward ($10 supermarket voucher), or to the control condition. Through analysis of parental fidelity across the four intervention conditions, it was found that parents assigned to the financial remuneration and praise/feedback intervention condition adhered to the STAR-NZ programme with a high level of fidelity (i.e., between 80– 100%), parents assigned to the standard condition (i.e., control) adhered to the programme with medium fidelity (60%–79%), and parents assigned to the coaching condition adhered to the programme with low fidelity (<59%). Further analysis indicates that the impact of the intervention on children’s CAP knowledge was stronger under the praise/feedback condition, compared to the financial and coaching conditions. The high fidelity rates for the praise/feedback condition, alongside the strong growth in CAP scores, suggest that this is the most effective method for supporting parental fidelity regarding the STAR-NZ intervention.

The fourth study provides a detailed analysis of two case studies of participants who responded strongly to the STAR-NZ intervention, in order to understand potential facilitators of success. Child factors (oral language status), parental factors (intervention condition), and educational factors (support from the early childhood centre) were identified as factors contributing to delivery of the intervention with high fidelity. Survey data from the teachers of the case study children allowed for identification of areas to strengthen in future use of the research intervention.

The findings of this thesis have important implications for the development and implementation of parent-led EL interventions within the New Zealand context. The difference in effectiveness of the various techniques used to support fidelity in this study, compared to the American literature, also indicates the need to examine facilitators and barriers to implementation of evidence-based research within the context in which it will be delivered.