Communication Disorders Quarterly - School-Year Grammatical Development 2019, Vol. 40(4) 228-238

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore

Oral narrative retells serve as a rich source for language development, and this study analyzed English-language retells collected across fall and spring from 65 Spanish-English dual language learners in kindergarten and first grade. Narrative Assessment Protocol transcripts were coded for microstructural elements inclusion and accuracy, grammatical utterance percentage, and verb error types. Prepositional and elaborated noun phrases, irregular past tense, and copula verbs were most frequent. Omission errors dominated, NAP code counts and diversity increased, grammaticality rose from about 77% to 87%, and all verb error types declined over the year.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Study approach and participants

Measures and coded grammatical targets

Key findings across the school year

Implications for direct feature coding

Communication Disorders Quarterly School-Year Grammatical Development 2019, Vol. 40(4) 228–238 © Hammill Institute on Disabilities 2018 Article reuse guidelines: in Narrative Retells: Spanish-English Dual [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/1525740118791138](DOI: 10.1177/1525740118791138)[ ](DOI: 10.1177/1525740118791138)[cdq.sagepub.com](cdq.sagepub.com) Language Learners Mary Claire Wofford, MS, CCC-SLP 1 and Carla L. Wood, PhD 1 Abstract Oral narrative retells are rich sources of information for language development. Investigators collected English-language oral narrative retells during the fall and spring from 65 Spanish-English-speaking dual language learners (DLL) in kindergarten and first grade. Investigators examined transcripts of oral narratives for (a) inclusion and accuracy of microstructural elements using the Narrative Assessment Protocol (NAP; Pence, Justice, & Gosse, 2007),(b) percentage of grammatical utterances, and (c) types of verb errors. Prepositional phrases, elaborated noun phrases, irregular past tense verbs, and copula verbs were the most prevalent grammatical forms. Omission errors were the most prevalent verb error type. DLLs’narrative retells revealed significantly increased number of total NAP codes and diversity of NAP codes. Grammaticality of utterances increased from approximately 77% to 87% from fall to spring. All verb errors types decreased over the academic year. Direct feature coding approaches are useful for tracking developmental progress in DLLs’ retells. Keywords cultural/linguistic, diversity, as a second language (ESL)/bilingualism/dialects, English/languages, acquisition/development, language/linguistics, Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), elementary school, Age, language, Assessment, syntax As population trends evidence a greater presence of dual language learners (DLLs) entering school systems nationally, there is an increasing need for accurate and culturally relevant assessment that reflects the variability in DLLs’language development. Often speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and other educators take primary responsibility for assessment of DLLs to identify needs for additional support by using a variety of assessment techniques. In particular, knowledge and use of language sampling procedures is considered best practice when assessing children from minoritylanguage backgrounds for language services (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHA], 2004) . Language sampling has been applauded as a mode of assessment that is naturalistic, ecologically valid, and culturally relevant (Bedore, Peña, Gillam & Ho, 2010; Cleave, Girolametto, Chen, & Johnson, 2010; Gutierrez-Clellen, Restrepo, Bedore, Peña, & Anderson, 2000; J. F. Miller & Iglesias, 2010; L. Miller, Gillam, & Peña, 2001). In addition, children newly introduced to academic settings are not disadvantaged in the assessment process by lack of familiarity with typical test-taking procedures (Bedore et al., 2010) . Results from language sampling may echo poor language performance determined by norm-referenced measures, or conversely language sampling measures may demonstrate that a child has other linguistic forms not evident in standardized performance. For this reason, inclusion of language sampling measures can significantly enhance eligibility determination and ongoing assessment. Given the flexibility of language sample analysis across context, language, task, and derived measures, greater use and exploration of different dimensions of language sampling practices is promising for the profession. Importantly, assessments that do not fully explore a DLL’s language abilities are at risk of misrepresenting a child’s language ability and may disproportionately disadvantage students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds (Kapantzoglou, Restrepo, & Thompson, 2012) . Historically, eviden

FAQs

What did the researchers examine in students’ oral narrative retells?

They analyzed transcripts for inclusion and accuracy of microstructural elements using the Narrative Assessment Protocol, the percentage of grammatical utterances, and the types of verb errors.

Which grammatical forms and verb error types were most prevalent?

Prepositional phrases, elaborated noun phrases, irregular past tense verbs, and copula verbs were most prevalent. Omission errors were the most prevalent verb error type.

How did grammaticality and verb errors change from fall to spring?

Grammaticality increased from about 77% to 87% across the academic year. All verb error types decreased over time.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore