School Age Child & Adolescent Flashcards
Syntax (Cheryl Scott)
- School age children spend a majority of day in comprehension activities (reading and listening)- our norms must show this
- Thus must shift from focus on spoken norms to assessing comprehension.
- Spoken norms have been on naturalistic tasks, but spend most of the day in contrived tasks (e. g. Language arts)
Discourse and syntax
-Discourse places constraints on syntax, and across several utterances.
John loved Mary
Mary was loved by John
It was John who loved Mary
Who John loved was Mary
It was Mary who was loved by John
-Reading, cohesion across utterances.
Semantics (Nippold)
- Speed, salience, & substance of semantic learning changes from year to year are often not obvious
- usually see research looking under wide age range variations (i.e. 9 and 12 years)
- Choices in academic freedom cause a high degree of variation (experience based vs. contextually)
- Need to look at academic vocabulary individually
- Need to look at local norms
- But first you need to establish/determine local norms!
Pragmatics (Norris)
- Situational Context- science experience
- Discourse Context- conversational
- Semantic Context- understanding the word
Narration (Johnson)
- Classroom Language Function
- Narrating- story
- Explaining or informing- understand and do
- Expressing personal opinion- teacher and sometimes students
- Describing
- Inferring cause
- Predicting consequences
- Lindifers (1987) Children Language and Learning (2nd ed)
- Cause and prediction are two of the biggest problems in comprehension for students
Audience/ Situation influences
- Audience/Situation influences development much more than chronological age
- Standardized tests miss this
- What is it really looking at
Assessing Spoken and Written Language
- Syntax- multilevel meaning-generally boils down to grammatical operations in isolated sentences, but syntax actually affected by discourse.
- Judging it for syntax, but you need to think about how it affects discourse
- Is an utterance spontaneous
- If a child answers a question with one word it could be pragmatically correct but syntactically poor.
Assessing Spoken and Written Language (Scott)
- Phrase Level
- NP–(predet + det + adj)
- Premod
- The girl
- the happy girl
- the happy girl who lives next door
- a few of the happy girls who live next door
- NP can be majority of utterances
Assessing Spoken and Written Language
- Sentence Level
- Add subordinate/relative clause
- Nominal object clause etc.
- Noun that is the object of a clause
- He is [ the boy who lived outside of the village ]
- Noun complement
Types of data
- Hard to determine what is immaturity, what is performance
- Quantity not so important with older school age children. One instance of a more sophisticated structure “very revealing” at this age.
- More complex language should be noticed in their writing
-Review of 20 articles to see what measure best to differentiate age, test type, and ability
- Words /T-unit differentiate age =80%
- Words/T-unit differentiate text type=60%
- Words/T-unit differentiate ability=60%
- Words/Clause age =70%
- Words/Clause text type=70%
- Words/Clause ability=50%
Review of 20 articles to see what measure best to differentiate age, test type, and ability
- Clauses/t-unit age= 55%
- Clauses/t-unit text type= 70%
- Clauses/t-unit ability= 25%
- Length all equal at 70% but inconsistent across studies.
- Opinion task-gets more complex structures***
-Narratives-get more maze behavior.*****
Task requires constant thinking, and TOM
-Some are better than others…DO not memorize this but know that it is possible to get results with informal tests
Nippold and language
- Not true that language development complete by early adolescents (or even age 5-6.)
- Hard to tell difference older kids
- Speed-fast in toddlers, slow in later adolscents, need to contrast wider age ranges
- Salience
- Substance
- Language is always developing
Loban 1
- C-unit=spoken language (communication unit- can use incomplete utterances, mazes)
- T-unit=written language (written)
Mean C-unit - Spoken - Written
grade 6 - 9.82 - 9.04
Grade 9 - 10.96 - 10.05
Grade 12 - 11.70 - 13.27
-Derivation from mean or absence of low frequency structures may indicate a disorder.
Loban 2
- Jacob (Grade 9) gifted program but had written problems.
- C-Unit Spoken lang 5.4 words
- “I go to the athletic club a lot”
- Some weights, some swimming”
- Will get different results from formal tasks. Ie. Tell a story, talk to an adult then with peers.
