Historically, Zambian pupils have performed poorly on regional and national
literacy examinations despite the best efforts of various stakeholders. The purpose of this
study was to investigate the differences in regular classroom instruction and two
treatment approaches, a clinician-directed approach and a home program, in literacy
acquisition in 7 participants from Lusaka, Zambia. This is a single-subject multiple
baseline study. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) was
used as the assessment measure. Activities from the Ladders to Literacy Kindergarten
Activity Workbook comprised the intervention protocol. Results indicated that
participants in treatment groups experienced greater improvements than controls on
DIBELS tasks. Children who received an intervention focused on training phonological
awareness skills performed better than children receiving regular classroom instruction.
More research should be developed to continue to investigate appropriate literacy training
protocols for Zambian children