David Trembath

Maria Lennox

Marleen F. Westerveld

&lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;Aims:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; To compare students’ oral language proficiency on sentence- versus text-level tasks at school entry and following tier 1 intervention in their first year of formal schooling. &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;Methods:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; 104 students participated in this study. Participants were part of a broader longitudinal study and were enrolled at 3 low socioeconomic, linguistically diverse Australian primary schools. Tasks were administered to all students at the beginning and end of the school year. Performance on the sentence-level task, the Renfrew Action Picture Test (RAPT), was analysed for information and grammar as per the test manual. Performance on the text-level task, the Profile of Oral Narrative Ability, was analysed for measures of story length, mean length of utterance, grammatical accuracy, number of different words, and story quality. &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;Results:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; Results showed that both tasks are sensitive to measure progress following tier 1 intervention. However, RAPT concern status was not related to oral narrative concern status. Furthermore, if only the RAPT task had been used, between 11 and 21% of students performing below expectations in oral narrative would not have been identified. &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; It is recommended that the assessment of oral language proficiency of students from culturally diverse, low socioeconomic backgrounds goes beyond the sentence level and includes an oral narrative retell task.</jats:p

Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Crossref