Presenters: Hannah Hayden ; Kate Low ; Cassie Rogers ; Camryn Lettich
Authors: Jillian Anderson, Logan Beddes, Hannah Hayden, Kate Low, Cassie Rogers, Naomi Wendt, Camryn Lettich, Kristi Jones
Faculty Advisor: Douglas Petersen
Institution: Brigham Young University
Expository language is a type of oral or written discourse which has the purpose of describing, explaining, and instructing a given topic. Multiple studies with older students have examined the text structure and complex language in expository writing (Hall-Mills & Apel, 2015; Koutsoftas & Gray, 2012). These studies revealed that children with language disorder score significantly lower on written language organization, production, complexity, and morphosyntax. However, these features of writing are rarely examined in young students. For example, in kindergarteners the focus is almost always on writing automaticity, orthographic abilities, and/or spelling (Kim, Otaiba, & Wanzeck, 2014). The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the written expository text structure, language complexity, and grammatical errors of kindergarten students with and without a language disorder. Participants were drawn from 686 kindergarten students across four school districts. A random sample of 68 students with language disorder were selected from the larger sample and were matched to 68 students who were typically developing across school location, gender, free/reduced lunch, ethnicity/race, and dominant language. Expository writing samples were collected in January and were analyzed using the Expository Language Measures Flow Chart (ELM). Additional language complexity and productivity features such as mean length of utterance, total number of words, number of different words, subordination indices, and grammatical accuracy were examined using the SALT language sample analysis software. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the data analyses have not yet been completed. However, we will report a) the means and standard deviations for the total text structure score from the ELM and each individual subsection of the ELM and b) language complexity performance from the ELM and the SALT data. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) will be conducted to examine whether there are significant differences across these measures between the students with and without language disorder.