The NSS is an efficient and informative tool for documenting children's development of narrative macrostructure. The relationship between the NSS and microstructural measures demonstrates that it is a robust measure of children's overall oral narrative competence and a powerful tool for clinicians and researchers. The unique relationship between lexical diversity and the NSS confirmed that a special relationship exists between vocabulary and narrative organization skills in young school-age children.

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish-English bilingual children attending kindergarten-third grade participated. Oral narratives were collected in each language along with measures of Passage Comprehension and Word Reading Efficiency. Results indicate that measures of oral language in Spanish predict reading scores in Spanish and that measures of oral language skill in English predict reading scores in English. Cross-language comparisons revealed that English oral language measures predicted Spanish reading scores and Spanish oral language measures predicted English reading scores beyond the variance accounted for by grade. Results indicate that Spanish and English oral language skills contribute to reading within and across languages.

Language sample analysis remains a powerful method of documenting language use in everyday speaking situations. A sample of talking reveals an individual's ability to meet specific speaking demands. These demands vary across contexts, and speakers can have difficulty in any one or all of these communication tasks. Language use for spoken communication is a foundation for literacy attainment and contributes to success in navigating relationships for school, work, and community participation.

Implications for the efficient use of language sample analysis in clinical protocols are discussed. A framework for eliciting reliable short samples is provided.

Analysis of children’s productions of oral narratives provides a rich description of children’s oral language skills. However, measures of narrative organization can be directly affected by both developmental and task-based performance constraints which can make a measure insensitive and inappropriate for a particular population and/or sampling method. This study critically reviewed four methods of evaluating children’s narrative organization skills and revealed that the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) was the most developmentally sensitive measure for a group of 129 5—7-year-old children who completed a narrative retell. Upon comparing the methods of assessing narrative organization skills, the NSS was unique in its incorporation of higher-level narrative features and its scoring rules, which required examiners to make subjective judgments across seven aspects of the narrative process. The discussion surrounded issues of measuring children’s narrative organization skills and, more broadly, issues surrounding sensitivity of criterion referenced assessment measures.