Assessing Young Children’s Oral Language: Recommendations for Classroom Practice and Policy

A systematic review of research studies on oral language assessments for four-to-eight-year-old children reveals that a preponderance of the research has been published in speech-language pathology and language testing journals. Although educational researchers recognize the importance of oral language to children’s literacy and learning, there is a paucity of research on oral language assessment conducted by educational researchers and published in educational research journals. The research identified in the systematic review focused primarily on narrative comprehension, vocabulary and syntax in children’s oral language. Researchers in the reviewed studies gathered children’s oral language samples in one-on-one adult-directed contexts for the most part. Bringing together results of the systematic review and findings from our action research with northern Canadian rural and Indigenous teachers, we discuss implications for developing classroom practices for assessing young children’s language across linguistic and cultural contexts. Policy implications include the creation of forums for teachers, literacy educators and speech-language pathologists to collaborate and learn from each other in order to support children’s oral language in classroom and speech-language service settings.We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this research through a Partnership Grant