Kindergarten is a critical year, providing a foundation for children's success in school. The newly adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) specify the literacy skills considered essential for success, including thirty-two language goals. Children seen by the speech-language pathologist (SLP) are at-risk for literacy because of language delays associated with developmental disabilities or delays (Catts, Adolf & Weismer, 2006; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003). This study explored whether a literacy-based language intervention implemented with at-risk kindergarteners by SLPs could improve the broad range of language skills profiled by the CCSS. The impact on oral and written language skills was examined. Five speech-language pathologists were trained to use a scaffolded multilevel approach to storybook reading. Discussions of illustrated events from the book were systematically talked about across a continuum of language levels from enumerating objects using a name or label and describing actions, through higher level inferential, evaluative, and metalinguistic concepts including phoneme and grapheme awareness skills. Eighteen kindergarteners with identified delays received the intervention twice weekly for 32 weeks. A control group of 18 kindergarteners with comparable language scores at pretest did not receive the treatment, although all were enrolled in other interventions for reading. The results of the study revealed that the intervention group made statistically significant gains in overall language, semantic, syntactic, and articulation skills. The gains were also clinically significant, with the majority of intervention subjects gaining near or greater than one standard deviation of change from pre- to posttest; these gains were not evident in the comparison group. Gains in written language skills were comparable to those made by the control group who received reading interventions. The results of the study indicate that utilizing scaffolded talk across a continuum of increasing more decentered meanings in kindergarten holds potential to address the broad range of language goals of the CCSS. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]