Oral Narrative Performance of African American Prekindergartners Who Speak Nonmainstream American English

Abstract

The results are useful in interpreting the performance of African American children during the prekindergarten school year.

Does Rare Vocabulary Use Distinguish Giftedness From Typical Development? A Study of School-Age African American Narrators

“…This result is incongruent with findings from Terry et al (2013), a study of African American preschoolers, which indicated a small inverse relationship between NMAE and three vocabulary measures: NDW (r = −.17, p < .05), PPVT-4 (r = −.29, p < .001), and Test of Preschool Early Literacy-Definitional Vocabulary (TOPEL; Lonigan, Wagner, Torgeson, & Rashotte, 2007;r = −.29, p < .001). Results of a correlational analysis indicated that there was no significant relationship between children's overall RWD and dialect variation.…”

“…Supporting the need for considering bias in commonly used tests are studies of both African American preschoolage (Terry et al, 2013) and school-age children that have found an inverse relationship between PPVT-4 performance and NMAE production. In fact, the strength of this relationship appears to be fairly stable: Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients are small at preschool age (r = −.29, p < .001; Terry et al, 2013) and are medium at school age (r = −.31, p < .05; Mills et al, 2013).…”

“…Because of its cultural and ecological validity, narrative assessment is recommended for bilingual (Gorman, a The Ohio State University, Columbus b Illinois State University, Normal c Saint Louis University, MO Fiestas, Peña, & Clark, 2011;Hester, 2010;Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003) and monolingual child speakers (Mills, Watkins, & Washington, 2013;Mills, 2015a;Terry, Mills, Bingham, Mansour, & Marencin, 2013). Across cultures, narratives are listened to and spoken by children and by people in children's speech communities (Berman & Slobin, 1994;Curenton, 2010;McCabe, 1997;Melzi, 2000).…”

The Home Literacy Environment and the English Narrative Development of Spanish–English Bilingual Children

“…For the present study, internal consistency for the NSS ranged from good to high (α = .77-.92) over the eight time points, with the exception of fall of kindergarten, where internal consistency was at the acceptable level (α = .63). Furthermore, the NSS was correlated with microstructure measures Terry et al, 2013), predicted a reading comprehension measure (Miller et al, 2006), and distinguished between narratives of children with disordered language and narratives of age-matched peers (Finestack et al, 2012;King et al, 2014).…”

“…These additional features are scored holistically by examining their use throughout the entire narrative; therefore, they go beyond the specific text-level content. The NSS has proven to be a satisfactory measure of macrostructure and overall narrative quality in several recent studies using diverse groups of children, including those who were learning English (Bajaj, 2007;Finestack, Palmer, & Abbeduto, 2012;King, Dockrell, & Stuart, 2014;Miller et al, 2006;Rollins, 2014;Terry, Mills, Bingham, Mansour, & Marencin, 2013;Zhang, Anderson, & NguyenJahiel, 2013). Therefore, it was chosen for this study.…”