Investigating Predictors of English Language Proficiency for Older School-Age Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Efficient language screening methods are needed for older school-age children and adolescents with suspected subclinical English language weaknesses. Twenty-five English-speaking monolingual children and fourteen Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 9;0 and 12;9 completed a nonword repetition task, a sentence repetition task, two grammaticality judgement tasks, and a passage comprehension task were examined relative to standard scores on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4. When stepwise regression analyses were performed to evaluate the utility of each measure to predict our language outcome measure, the optimal model for monolingual children consisted only of the sentence repetition task. For the group of bilingual children, the optimal model consisted of the sentence repetition task and the passage comprehension task. These results provide support for the use of sentence repetition to gain insight into the English language proficiency of school-age children and adolescents with possible subclinical English language weaknesses.