Storytelling Abilities in African American Children: Response to a Standardized Test
This research addresses the importance of collecting data on the performance of African American children on a standardized oral narrative assessment, the Renfrew Bus Story. There is a need for collecting such data because. African American children are significantly overrepresented in special education programs. The overrepresentation is related to the misdiagnosis of disabilities, such as language disorders. The frequent misdiagnosis of language disorders in African American children is often based on the misunderstanding of cultural differences, and the lack of inclusion of these factors in standardized language assessments. The Bus Story is the only standardized language assessment for oral narratives, and it is most widely used because it assesses narrative ability, an important factor in determining if a child has a language disorder. However, the test is normed on middle class European American and British children. Further, there is limited research on the performance of African American children on the Bus Story. This study was conducted to determine (1) How African American English speaking preschoolers from low income backgrounds perform on a story retelling task as compared to the normative sample and; (2) if performance varies from the norm, what characterizes these differences in the children? The conclusions were that the (1) Renfrew Bus Story must include normative data for African American children, and; (2) the test must account for the differing narrative styles among African American Children. Both must be implemented in order for the test to be culturally valid.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Speech - Language Pathology
Research Advisor:
Adele Proctor
Department of Research Advisor:
Speech and Hearing Science
Year of Publication:
2003