THIS PAPER WAS PRESENTED AT A TWO-PART CONFERENCE ON PLANNING AND OPERATING LANGUAGE LABORATORIES. DISCUSSED WERE PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF CONSTRUCTING TESTS OF ORAL PRODUCTION. TEST EXAMPLES WERE GIVEN IN FRENCH. METHODS FOR DEVELOPING MORE OBJECTIVE TEST PROGRAMS WERE PRESENTED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PART OF A SERIES, ED 003 919-ED 003 924, AND ED 003…

Designed to measure the acquisition of syntactic structures in kindergarten, first, and second graders, this test examines specific linguistic structures which appear to be acquired during the early elementary school years. Thirty-six sentences of equal length, consisting of words from a first-grade word list, are used to examine fifteen…

The results of a study in which eight black kindergarten children responded to a set of structured tasks designed to elicit linguistic constructions which characterize Black English are presented and discussed in this Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) technical note. Some of the children responded with a high rate of nonstandard realizations;…

The O'Donnell "Perception of Alternate Structures Test" (P. A. S. T.) was designed to produce a more efficient measure of perception of syntactic features. Like Simons'"Deep Structure Recovery Test" (D. S. R. T.), the P. A. S. T. has two sentences in each item that are similar in underlying structure. Like the earlier O'Donnell "Test of…

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Two hundred and twenty-five fourth, fifth, and sixth graders who represented a relatively wide range of abilities and socioeconomic backgrounds were the subjects of this study designed to investigate the relationships between language-pattern encoding (spelling) and reading proficiency. The two primary null hypotheses were (1) that knowledge of…

To find out if a computer could be programmed to efficiently analyze the psychosocial factors in the speech of children, taped language samples were collected from structured interviews with 81 male and 63 female kindergarten children. Thirty psychological and social factors relevant to children's speech were drawn from the words in the samples. A…

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

Designed to determine to what degree the reader's awareness of recognition of certain structural aspects of written English is a factor in reading comprehension, this measure defines four word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) in syntactical or formal terms rather than in semantic terms. Each item in the test consists of two sentences:…

In this study, everyday mother-to-toddler speech patterns among disadvantaged and advantaged groups were examined in the home environment. The Schachter FIS-C (Functions of Interpersonal Speech of Caretakers) language measuring instrument was applied to mother speech in three sociolinguistic urban groups: black disadvantaged, black advantaged, and…

Four tests--PPVT, ITPA, MRT, WPPSI--commonly used to measure language development in young children are evaluated by four criteria: (1) what development aspects do they claim to tap; (2) what do they actually tap; (3) what linguistic knowledge is presupposed; (4) what special problems face a non-standard English speaker. These tests are considered…