Expository Language Skills of Young School-Age Children
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Author(s)
Westerveld, Marleen F
Moran, Catherine A
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2011
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Purpose: This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between young and older school-age children. Method: Expository discourse was elicited from two groups of children using the favorite game or sport (FGS) task. Performance of the younger age group (n = 61), age 6;0 (years;months) to 7;11, was compared to that of a group of twenty 11-yearold ...
View more >Purpose: This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between young and older school-age children. Method: Expository discourse was elicited from two groups of children using the favorite game or sport (FGS) task. Performance of the younger age group (n = 61), age 6;0 (years;months) to 7;11, was compared to that of a group of twenty 11-yearold children from an earlier study. Samples were analyzed on measures of verbal productivity, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency. Results: The FGS task was effective in eliciting text-level discourse from young school-age children. These children produced discourse that resulted in a fairly normal distribution across some of the language production measures. Age-related differences were observed on measures of verbal productivity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency, but not on syntactic complexity. Conclusion: The findings suggest that expository discourse sampling may be a useful addition to a language assessment protocol, even for very young school-age children.
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View more >Purpose: This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between young and older school-age children. Method: Expository discourse was elicited from two groups of children using the favorite game or sport (FGS) task. Performance of the younger age group (n = 61), age 6;0 (years;months) to 7;11, was compared to that of a group of twenty 11-yearold children from an earlier study. Samples were analyzed on measures of verbal productivity, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency. Results: The FGS task was effective in eliciting text-level discourse from young school-age children. These children produced discourse that resulted in a fairly normal distribution across some of the language production measures. Age-related differences were observed on measures of verbal productivity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency, but not on syntactic complexity. Conclusion: The findings suggest that expository discourse sampling may be a useful addition to a language assessment protocol, even for very young school-age children.
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Journal Title
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools
Volume
42
Copyright Statement
© 2011 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. This is the author-manuscript version of this paper. Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal website for access to the definitive, published version.
Subject
Clinical sciences
Specialist studies in education
Applied linguistics and educational linguistics