Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following...

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.

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.

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.

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.