CONCORDANCE BETWEEN TEACHER THERAPIST OPINION AND FORMAL LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT SCORES IN CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT/

As part of a wirier study, 242 children attending language units attac hed to mainstream schools were assessed on a number of formal language assessments. In addition, each child's teacher was asked to state whe ther, for each of four areas of language difficulty, the participant e xhibited this impairment. The four areas were: articulation, phonology , syntax/morphology and semantic/pragmatic impairment. This report com pares test results between children thought by their teacher or therap ist to show each impairment and those not thought clinically to show t he difficulty. Investigations into suitable cut-off scores for the tes ts used were also examined using level of agreement between the two mo des of assessment as criteria, For articulation, phonology and syntax/ morphology, teacher opinion was found to discriminate significantly on at least some formal tests. However, for children with semantic/pragm atic impairment, no tests used identified their problems. Furthermore, by use of 25th centile cut-off scores, 66% agreement levels between t eacher and lest groupings were found in all bur the group with semanti c/pragmatic impairments. The importance and limitations of analysis of teacher-test concordance is discussed as well as the current lack of suitable formal assessment material for semantic and pragmatic languag e impairment.