Language Sampling

Free Play

Language sampling with young children, under the age of 4, occurs in a free play context, in which spontaneous language is elicited while engaging the child in a play activity, such as play dough or small toys. To ensure that a representative sample of the child’s language is obtained, it is recommended following the child’s lead and commenting on the child’s actions. Asking too many questions or asking closed questions should be avoided as they will influence the child’s language output.

Conversation

For children aged 4 and older, it is more time-efficient to collect a language sample in conversation, using an interview format in which the child is asked to talk about family members or pets and about activities at home or at school. Conversations consist of a dialogue in which speakers take turns initiating ideas, commenting, and asking questions. Because conversation plays an important role in everyday life activities, this discourse context is appropriate for clients of all ages, including adolescents and adults. When eliciting a conversational sample it is important to include topics that are of interest to the client, such as a favorite hobby, as research has shown this will yield a syntactically more complex language sample. Conversational language samples provide important information about clients’ language use or pragmatics, including their ability to ask and answer questions and to stay on topic. It should be noted that during conversation, children, adolescents, and adults produce utterances that are shorter and less complex than those produced in other discourse contexts, such as narrative, expository, and persuasion.

Narratives

From about 4 years of age, children may be able to produce simple narratives. Narratives refer to monologues of connected events and include scripts and personal narratives (recounts of personal events), as well as fictional narratives. Narrative proficiency during the preschool years is a known predictor of reading comprehension performance, especially the ability to retell a simple story or sequence of events using a logical order and appropriate vocabulary. Both preschool and school-age children are exposed to narratives on a daily basis, for [Page 1014]example, when sharing personal stories with their teacher or peers or when creating imaginative stories as required under the English curriculum. Narrative language samples in preschool and school-age children may thus be elicited using fictional story generation or retell tasks or in a personal narrative condition.

...