The Listening Skills Test--a new instrument to assess children's pragmatic ability

Research has established that the development of autonomous (as opposed to collaborative) communication skills, using referential communication speaker and listener tasks, develops only slowly during the primary school years. Such a finding has implications for the classroom which puts a premium on independent language processing. Although the importance of oral language is recognised in the National Curriculum, there has been little attempt to assess the ability formally. The Listening Skills Test is a standardised pragmatic instrument focusing on the 3 1/2-7 years age group. The test is in four parts and assesses the ability to make judgements about the efficacy of verbal messages or instructions. Tasks include relating messages to arrays of pictorial items, making judgements about statements that refer to one complex picture, marking routes on a street plan in response to an extended set of instructions, and the ability to evaluate purely verbal utterances. The overall aim of the test is to assess children's ability to make sense on their own of verbal information in a decontextualised situation thought to represent the nature of much transactional communication in the classroom. Suggestions for remediation that have arisen from research conducted by the authors are also discussed.