The Evaluation of a Technique for Measuring Improvement in Oral Composition

Abstract

During the past decade workers in the ele mentary school field have pointed out that emphasis on the development of the skills in written and oral expression must coincide more closely with the life demands on lan guage. They have shown that most of the out-of-school demands on language ability are of the oral type and that teachers spend too much time on the mechanical and tech nical aspects of language. Perhaps the rela tive ease of judging the mechanical and tech nical aspects and the lack of an objective means of judging oral productions have led to this overemphasis on written language. Also, textbooks and courses of study have been much less provident of materials for oral language. Modern curricular emphasis is being ad justed to provide more adequate oral lan guage instruction and with this expansion have come certain problems in materials and methods. One of these problems is the dis covery of a technique for measuring improve ment in oral composition. A common means of measuring improvement in written compo sition has been a scale. Whether this tech nique is applicable to the measurement of im provement in oral composition has not been determined, because until very recently no method of making exact reproductions of oral compositions was available. Now that exact reproductions can be made by means of re cording equipment it is possible to evaluate the as a method of measuring improve ment in oral composition. The purpose of this study was to evaluate experimentally an oral language as a means of revealing group and individual growth in ability to use oral language skills. Because no adequate oral language scales were available, the con struction of such instruments became a neces sary preliminary to the experimental phases of the study. In this discussion the term scale is con sidered to mean a group of children's pro ductions ranging from very poor to very good, arranged in ascending order and of such quality that the second is approximately as much better than the first as the third is better than the second and as the fourth is better than the third.