Evaluating the California State Narrative Language Standards: A Database Approach

Dr. Jon Miller, Claudia Dunaway, Jennifer Taps Richard and Ann Nockerts recently shared information about utilizing language sampling in addition to rubrics as methods to select appropriate interventions and to monitor progress. Please find resources below on this page from the 2010 California Speech-Language Hearing Association Convention workshop in Monterey.

Summary of Workshop:

Studies over the past two decades document that narrative language progress predicts reading achievement in both monolingual and bilingual children. California stipulates explicit narrative language arts standards for every grade, K – 12, yet there are few measures available to document student progress. This seminar will review the state standards in detail and report on a decade-long collaboration between the University of Wisconsin– Madison, the San Diego Unified School District and SALT Software to create narrative language databases to measure student progress. Narrative language databases for story retelling by several thousand English-fluent and bilingual (Spanish/English) ELL children will be reviewed in detail. The clinical use of these databases will be demonstrated with case studies. Finally, future projects to expand the databases will be discussed.

This handout includes the San Diego Unified School District Narrative Rubric, the SALT Narrative Scoring Scheme, examples of pretest and posttest for one English-speaking student, summaries of SALT variables and conventions and an action plan.