Interrelationships Among a Group of Language Arts Tests

Abstract

AT ONE time reading, spelling, and other language abilities were consid ered to be relatively compartmentalized and distinct from one another, and the school day, accordingly, used to include separate periods devoted to each of these subjects. More recently the trend has been toward integration and co ordination in the teaching of the various language arts. It has, however, been suggested that the skills involved in the language arts are essentially of two kinds?those which are used mainly as receptive instruments for the purpose of extending an individual's experience and those which function chief ly as tools of expression^*. At least one recent study has attempted to investigate the interrelationships of the language abilities. Hughes^ studied the relationships among a number of language skills: reading, spelling, word meaning, language usage, capital ization, punctuation, paragraph organization, and sentence sense. The data were obtained from the results of a series of tests given to pupils at the fifth grade level. Among the tests given was an intelligence test and an attempt was made to control the factor of intelligence by including in the study only those 196 pupils whose intelligence quotients were between 90 and 110. The investi gator concludes that The correlations as a whole tend to show that each of these selected language abilities studied is related in a positive manner to the other language abiliti e s, in dependent of the effects of intelligence. The present investigation attempts to shed further light on the nature of the relationships among the language abilities. The data were obtained in connec tion with the development of the language arts tests of the Evaluation and Ad justment Series of high school tests?*. When the series was planned, the organ ization of the tests was determined partly by the need for tests which conform