Assessing the Grammar of Spanish-Speaking Children

The present investigation compared two testing instruments for evaluating the grammatical skills of Spanish-speaking preschool children. The Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test-Preschool (SPELT-P, Werner & Kresheck, 1989) was compared to a structured task activity developed by the investigator. Both procedures targeted the same grammatical forms. Results indicated that the structured task procedure was more effective in evaluating children’s productive knowledge of the grammatical forms tested. Children performed significantly better in this task. Procedural differences across the testing instruments were responsible for the observed differences. Issues concerning the effect of task on performance are discussed as they relate to the assessment of the culturally and linguistically diverse child.