Dynamic assessment of narrative ability in English accurately identifies language impairment in English language learners.

PURPOSE To assess the identification accuracy of dynamic assessment (DA) of narrative ability in English for children learning English as a 2nd language. METHOD A DA task was administered to 54 children: 18 Spanish-English-speaking children with language impairment (LI); 18 age-, sex-, IQ- and language experience-matched typical control children; and an additional 18 age- and language experience-matched comparison children. A variety of quantitative and qualitative measures were collected in the pretest phase, the mediation phase, and the posttest phase of the study. Exploratory discriminant analysis was used to determine the set of measures that best differentiated among this group of children with and without LI. RESULTS A combination of examiner ratings of modifiability (compliance, metacognition, and task orientation), DA story scores (setting, dialogue, and complexity of vocabulary), and ungrammaticality (derived from the posttest narrative sample) classified children with 80.6% to 97.2% accuracy. CONCLUSION DA conducted in English provides a systematic means for measuring learning processes and learning outcomes, resulting in a clinically useful procedure for identifying LIs in bilingual children who are in the process of learning English as a second language.