Abstract
This study investigated classroom differences in the narrative performance of school-age African American English (AAE)-speaking children in gifted and general education classrooms. Forty-three children, Grades 2-5, each generated fictional narratives in response to the book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Differences in performance on traditional narrative measures (total number of communication units [C-units], number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words) and on AAE production (dialect density measure) between children in gifted and general education classrooms were examined. There were no classroom-based differences in total number of C-units, number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words. Children in gifted education classrooms produced narratives with lower dialect density than did children in general educated classrooms. Direct logistic regression assessed whether narrative dialect density measure scores offered additional information about giftedness beyond scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007), a standard measure of language ability. Results indicated that a model with only Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Fourth Edition scores best discriminated children in the 2 classrooms. African American children across gifted and general education classrooms produce fictional narratives of similar length, lexical diversity, and syntax complexity. However, African American children in gifted education classrooms may produce lower rates of AAE and perform better on standard measures of vocabulary than those in general education classrooms.
Highlights
This study investigated classroom differences in the spoken narrative performance of school-age African American children in gifted versus general education classrooms
Hayes et al (1998) found that narrative length and syntax complexity varied in gifted children, such that 13-year-old high-achieving gifted children outperformed underachieving children on these measures in a narrative generation task
The current study found that standardized measures of verbal ability, such as the PPVT-4, were better able to distinguish children in gifted education classrooms from children in general education classrooms than holistic measures of verbal ability, such as narratives
Summary
Given the potential for overreliance on standardized testing to evaluate language ability, the purpose of the current study was to determine the utility of narrative performance to provide evidence of the linguistic strengths of African American gifted children
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