The use of the Renfrew Bus Story with 5–8-year-old Australian children

Guest Editor: David Trembath

Abstract

Purpose: Research into the language sampling practices of Australian speech pathologists suggests the Bus Story Test is a frequently used standardized tool for eliciting story retelling samples for screening, diagnosis, goal-setting, and progress monitoring purposes. Because this task has not been normed on an Australian population, this study investigated the usefulness of the Bus Story for young school-age Australian children.

Method: In total, 125 Australian primary-school children (aged 5;3–8;9) participated in the Bus Story task. Children attending Year 2 also retold the story Frog Where Are You. Children's performance was analysed for measures of information and sentence length (Bus Story only), story length, MLU, number of different words and clausal density.

Result: Performance on the Bus Story improved with year-of-schooling for all measures. Between 21–64% of the children performed below expectations on information or length scores when using the published norms. The retell task Frog Where Are You elicited longer samples, containing a higher number of different words.

Conclusion: Using the published Bus Story norms will potentially result in over- identification of language impairment. The retell task Frog Where Are You may provide a useful alternative for assessing young school-aged children's story retelling ability.

Keywords::

• Bus Story
• Frog Where Are You
• school-age children
• story retelling
• language sample analysis

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by an Emerging Researcher Grant, awarded to the first author by the School of Arts, Education and Law, Griffith University. In-kind assistance for this project was provided by the Department of Education and Training. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily present the views of the Department. A sincere thank you to all the speech pathologists for volunteering their time and assisting in the data collection.

Declaration of interest: The project was supported by SALT Software LLC, who provided software support, but was not involved in any aspects of the study. The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.