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ERIC Number: EJ920428
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Apr
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0161-1461
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Expository Language Skills of Young School-Age Children
Westerveld, Marleen F.; Moran, Catherine A.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, v42 n2 p182-193 Apr 2011
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-year-old 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.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). 10801 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852. Tel: 800-638-8255; Fax: 301-571-0457; e-mail: subscribe@asha.org; Web site: http://lshss.asha.org/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A