Reduction of Cultural Bias in Simon's Evaluating Communicative Competence for Australian Clinical Settings

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that poor communication skills lead to reductions in classroom performance. Current trends focus less on the pathology in the child and more on the characteristics of the classroom and the curriculum which contribute to failure. Data are required on the student's effectiveness as a communicator, both in listener and speaker roles in a variety of contexts. Until recently, instruments available to evaluate functional pragmatic abilities in school children and adolescents were lacking. A welcome addition to the set of tools available to clinicians is Simon's (1986) Evaluating Communicative Competence (ECC). The ECC is a set of criterion-referenced tasks which permit observation of the student's language during interactive, classroom-like activities. As with many instruments currently available to Australian clinicians, a number of items reflect their American origins. This cultural bias interferes with the purpose of the ECC: to evaluate communicative abilities. Therefore, a set of linguistically equivalent substitutions is suggested to replace the culturally biased items. This increases the face validity of the ECC for Australian subjects. Further, widespread use of these suggested modifications will allow for consistency between examiners and across serial administrations for individual subjects. The ECC, with the proposed Australian modifications, is recommended for use in documenting communicative abilities in children and adolescents with language-learning disabilities.