Language Proficiency Measures

Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (DELV) - Syntax Domain

Wh- questions (comprehension and production)

Knowledge of syntactic variables, syntactic barriers to movement and embedded clauses.

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Passives Knowledge of movement rules and

implied agents

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Articles Understanding of varieties of meaning

expressed by articles in English

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- Semantics Domain

Verb and Preposition Contrast Items

Organisation of the child‟s verb and preposition lexicon into contrasting words and levels of meaning

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Quantifier Items Understanding the meaning and scope of the quantifier “every”

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Fast Mapping Fast mapping of meaning of unknown

verbs from their argument structure

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- Pragmatics Domain

Question answer planning Asking the right question to discover missing information

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Communicative Role taking Understanding the viewpoint of speakers and the speech acts they are producing

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Narratives

Reference specification, expressions of temporal relationships between events, and theory of mind

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

According to O‟Leary (2004), ethics is an integral part of each and every research, and ethical approval must be fulfilled in order to ensure the credibility of the data gathered. Ethical approval is required in order to safeguard the mental, emotional, and physical interests of the participants. Thus, whenever contact with human participants is involved in conducting research, it is

expected that ethical approval be obtained (O‟Leary, 2004). Approval from the Ethics committee of the University of Witwatersrand (protocol number: H080503) and the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) in order to conduct the study was previously obtained when the participants were initially assessed (Jordaan, 2009) and thus further approval was not necessary as the same participants were used for this study. Informed consent was obtained by Jordaan (2009), from the principals of the specified schools as well as the school teachers so that testing could be

conducted on the participants (Appendix A). Additional informed consent was obtained by the principals so that the educator questionnaires could be provided to the teachers of the participants in this study. Furthermore, due to the fact that the participants were under the legal age of

eighteen, informed consent was obtained from their parents/legal guardians as well as assent from the participants themselves (Appendix A). The children, parents, teachers and the principal were provided with information sheets and consent forms including details regarding the general purpose of the study and reasons for the testing. Confidentiality of responses was assured, and participants were informed that if any questions or queries arise, the researcher would gladly respond to them.

Gray Oral Reading Test 4th Edition (GORT- 4)

- Reading Comprehension The participants ability to comprehend text   3. Cognitive Processing Measures

Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA)

- Digital Repetition Verbal Short Term Memory 

- Dot Matrix Visuo-spatial Short Term Memory 

- Listening Recall Verbal Working Memory 

- Spatial Recall Visuo-spatial Working Memory 

Non Word Repetition Test

- Dollaghan & Campbell (1998) Phonological Memory 

Sentence Repetition Test (Redmond, 2005)

One of the difficulties in this research was the fact that intervention could not be withheld from the children who were identified as language impaired and thus the researcher ensured that mechanisms for appropriate referral were in place.

DATA COLLECTION

All the participants were tested individually in a quiet area of the school at a time designated by the teacher and that did not interfere with their school work at the end of their grade one, two and three years on all the above mentioned instruments by (Jordaan, 2009) with the exception of the educator questionnaire which was provided to the teachers of only the participants of this study. The tests were administered by the researcher and one other research assistant, familiar with test procedures, so as to ensure a degree of reliability in the results obtained. These tests were administered and scored according to the instructions in the relevant manuals and where necessary raw scores were converted into percentages for ease of comparison.

DATA ANALYSIS

Descriptive statistics, correlational statistics and inferential statistics were used to analyse all the data obtained for this study.

The purpose of descriptive statistics is to illustrate the properties of a sample (Mertens, 2005). It also provides an overview of the data collected (Baxter & Babbie, 2004). In essence, descriptive statistics consist of two kinds of measures i.e. measures of central tendency (mean) and measures of variability (range and standard deviation) (Mertens, 2005). The mean is a brief description of a group of numbers with regard to centrality and the range provides the highest and lowest values in a data group (Mertens, 2005). Means, standard deviations and ranges were calculated for all the language proficiency assessment measures and the cognitive processing assessment measures as well as the teacher rating scale to establish individual variation in all scores on all the

measures of assessment. This also allowed for the results obtained from the EAL learners with suspected SLI to be compared to the EFL learners with suspected SLI so as to aid in the discussion on the manifestations of SLI in these learners.

Correlational statistics aim to illustrate the strength and direction of the relationship between two or more variables (Mertens, 2005). Pearson‟scorrelation coefficientwas used to establish

whether there was a positive relationship between the results obtained on the different subtests of the DELV-CR with the working memory measures, phonological memory measures and the teacher rating scales in order to provide information regarding these tests as assessment measures on EAL learners as well as to further enhance the validity of this study. Data correlations were also performed between the DELV-CR and the GORT-4 to establish whether there was a relationship between the oral and literate measures of academic language proficiency. For the purpose of this study, a significance level of 5% (0.05) was used. Thus, a p-value of less than 0.05 can be considered to be significant.

Inferential statistics allows the researcher to make inferences, from the results obtained from the sample, to a larger population (Baxter & Babbie, 2004) and essentially measures differences amongst groups (Mertens, 2005). An Independent sample t-test was used to determine whether there were any significant differences between the EAL and EFL learners‟ performance on all three subtests of the DELV-CR test in grade one, two and three in order to provide information as to whether bilingual learners with language impairment are more impaired than monolingual learners with language impairment in the acquisition of academic language. Independent sample t-tests were also used to determine if there were significant differences between the EAL-SLI learners and their typically developing age matched EAL peers to provide further information regarding the use of sentence repetition tests in differentiating “slow to learn” EAL learners from learners with language impairment.

Lastly, in terms of the qualitative component, the data obtained from the educator questionnaire was analysed using content analysis. Content analysis is the method through which a set of categories or themes are identified and the researcher then counts the number of instances that fall into each category (Silverman, 2000). Likewise, Rosenthal and Rosnow (1991) state that content analysis is the objective, systematic strategy of decomposing messages, and then evaluating their contents in order to reveal specific characteristics. Therefore, the data from the questionnaires were examined for common themes and categories regarding the language difficulties these EAL and EFL learners with suspected SLI display in the classroom.

CHAPTER 5