Preschool Language Assessment Instrument

The Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI-2), published by PRO-ED (http://www.proedinc.com), is a nationally standardized tool for assessing children's discourse abilities. It consists of 70 items that are classified in terms of four levels of abstraction (matching, selective analysis, reordering, and reasoning) and two modes of responding (receptive and expressive). Items from each category are interspersed to simulate the demands of classroom discourse. The test, which takes about 30 minutes to administer, is intended for children between 3 years, 0 months to 5 years, 11 months. Scoring procedures classify responses according to the levels of abstraction and modes of responses yielding scores for six subtests for 4- to 5-year-olds. Reordering and reasoning are combined for the 3-year-olds, resulting in five subtests. The inclusion of normative data permits evaluation of whether children's classroom discourse skills are developing normally. The test also permits identification of strengths and weaknesses and documentation of change over time.

The four levels of abstraction represent increasing levels of difficulty encountered in classroom discourse. Receptive and expressive items are included in each level. Matching, the lowest level of abstraction, involves naming items (e.g., “What is this?”), pointing to named items (e.g., “Find me a cup”), following directions, or imitating. Some items require visual matching and visual memory. Selective Analysis, the next level of abstraction, requires selective attention to visual detail. The receptive items require understanding descriptions (e.g., given a picture, “show me what we use for cleaning dishes” or “find something we could eat with”), following multistep directions, and identifying differences. The expressive items involve answering a variety of Wh questions (e.g., who, what, where, how, which, and what is happening) in response to pictures or a brief narrative. Auditory memory, integration, and classification are required for successful responses at this level. The third level of abstraction, Reordering, requires overriding perceptual clues while selecting or identifying multiple features in a picture (e.g., “If I wanted to paint a picture, show me all the things I don't need”). This level also requires identifying similarities, defining words (e.g., “Tell me what a fork is”) or solving class inclusion problems. The highest level of abstraction, Reasoning, requires predicting events under specified conditions (e.g., “Given a stack of blocks, select the picture that shows what will happen if the bottom block is removed”). The responses at this highest level specify predictions, logical justifications, and causal relations.

Raw scores for each subtest are converted into scaled standard scores, percentile ranks, descriptive ratings, and age-equivalent scores. Scaled scores for the receptive and expressive subtests are converted into an overall Discourse Ability Score. The expressive responses are also scored in terms of four levels of adequacy and six types of interfering behaviors. The authors describe these latter types of scores as measures of pragmatic aspects of communication.

An original 165-item version and a more practical 60-item experimental edition of the test were [Page 783]developed in 1978. The original versions and the current revised test are based on a model of classroom discourse in which a child is required to respond to varying levels of abstraction. At the lowest level, language is connected to concrete perceptions, whereas at the highest level, language is used to reflect upon perceptions. The PLAI-2 has expanded the number of items from 60 to 70. It has added normative data representative of the 2000 U.S. population, full-color illustrations, new reliability and validity data, as well as two additional scales related to adequacy of responses and interfering behaviors. Reported data indicate that the overall Discourse Ability Score meets current minimum standards for test-retest reliability.

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