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

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- identifi cation 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.