Syntactic Skills of Spanish-Speaking Children With Low School Achievement

This study compared the syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with low and average school achievement from kindergarten to fifth grade using oral narratives that were elicited with book and film retelling tasks. Both narrative tasks required the child to provide information that was presumably unknown to the listener and that could not be derived from the visual context. Results indicated that children who were performing below grade expectations (according to curriculum-based assessments) exhibited limited use of complex syntax and greater formulation difficulties in their narratives than their peers. There were no significant task differences in the use of complex language. The analysis of children's syntactic performance in narratives provided information regarding language skills that appeared related to school achievement.