There is broad consensus on the need to foster oral skills in middle school due to their inherent importance and because they serve as a tool for learning and acquiring other competences. In order to facilitate the assessment of communicative competence, we hereby propose a model which establishes five key dimensions for effective oral communication: interaction management; multimodality and prosody; textual coherence and cohesion; argumentative strategies; and lexicon and terminology. Based on this model, we developed indicators to measure the proposed dimensions, thus generating a self-report tool to assess oral communication in middle school. Following an initial study conducted with 168 students (mean age = 12.47 years, SD = 0.41), we selected 22 items with the highest discriminant power, while in a second study carried out with a sample of 960 students (mean age 14.11 years, SD = 0.97), we obtained evidence concerning factorial validity and the relationships between oral skills, emotional intelligence and metacognitive strategies related to metacomprehension. We concluded that the proposed model and its derived measure constitute an instrument with good psychometric properties for a reliable and valid assessment of students’ oral competence in middle school.

The role of children’s verbal repetition of parents’ utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults’ and children’s spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads during spontaneous interaction at 21, 24 and 30 months. Linguistic level was measured using the Spanish version of the MacArthur CDI (López-Ornat et al., 2005). Children’s and adults’ repetitions are about 17% of the speech. Children repeated adults’ utterances in a reduced manner whereas adults produced more extended repetitions. Adults’ rate of repetition predicted children’s linguistic level at 30 months. Children’s rate of repetition did not predict linguistic level. These results suggest that parents adapt their speech to children’s communicative abilities. Since children’s rate of repetition did not predict linguistic level, we suggest that verbal imitation plays an indirect and complex role in communicative development.

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El objetivo del presente artículo es valorar la eficacia de un programa de intervención logopédica de corte naturalista. Fueron seleccionadas 16 familias monolingües españolas con hijos/as hablantes tardíos/as de entre 24 y 29 meses de edad, y, posteriormente, asignadas a dos condiciones experimentales (intervención y control). Las familias pertenecientes al grupo de intervención se beneficiaron de un programa logopédico de intervención naturalista en el que las rutinas familiares se utilizaron para estimular el desarrollo comunicativo y lingüístico de los/as niños/as y para desarrollar estilos conversacionales ajustados a su nivel de comunicación y lenguaje. Con las familias del grupo control se empleó la estrategia “wait and see” (esperar y ver). Pasados cuatro meses de intervención naturalista, los resultados informaron de que las familias del grupo de intervención usaban más conductas ajustadas y sus hijos presentaban un vocabulario más extenso y producían más combinaciones de palabras frente al grupo control.

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