Purpose: As a representative form of discourse, oral narratives offer a sensitive, flexible, and ecologically valid tool for language evaluation. Nevertheless, oral narrative assessments in mainland China remain uncommon among school-age children. Therefore, this study explores the effectiveness of narrative microstructural assessment in…

Purpose: This study compared the development of essential elements of narrative skill in children from African American English (AAE)- and general American English (GAE)-speaking communities using an innovative elicitation and evaluation protocol consisting of four key indices of narrative language: (a) reference contrasting, (b) temporal…

Changes in feature awareness and production during phonological intervention were examined in four preschool children with severe phonological impairments. Results indicated that the rate and degree of change in awareness did not always parallel production performance, suggesting that both feature awareness and production should be considered when…

This paper proposes a definition of clinically significant change in communication ability and suggests three evaluation criteria, including determining whether the change resulted from treatment rather than uncontrolled factors, whether the change was real rather than random, and whether the change was important rather than trivial. (Author/JDD)

This paper addresses the issue of when a child should be discharged from language intervention, by integrating the concept of multiple treatment outcomes into existing frameworks of treatment dismissal. Techniques are offered for evaluating a child's progress toward attainment of ultimate, intermediate, and instrumental outcomes. (Author/JDD)

This article considers the models and beliefs of language clinicians, as reflected by their choice of specific assessment instruments or measurement methods. Differences in construct and philosophy are demonstrated in a review of personality and vocational preference inventories and several subtests of sentence production. (DB)