Writing Characteristics of School-Aged Children with Specific Language Impairment

Gyung, Yu; Eunhee, Jeong

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2008;13(1): 63-85.

Yu Gyung^` , and Jeong Eunhee^`

유경(Yu Gyung)| 정은희(Jeong Eunhee)

ABSTRACT

children. The objective of this study was to investigate the characteristics of writing in the school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI).
Methods
Seventeen children with SLI and 24 normal children (4th-6th elementary school students) were evaluated with K-WISC Ⅲ and the Test of Problem Solving. We also evaluated their writing knowledge (i.e., propositional knowledge, strategic knowledge, tacit knowledge) from the text which were collected from their writing task with the picture “Farm”. SPSS 13.0 was used to analyze the children’s test results. The two groups were compared in total scores and subtests scores using the Mann-Whitney U test.
Results
The results were as follows: (1) the total score of propositional knowledge in the SLI children was significantly lower than that in normal children. In the analysis of propositional knowledge, the scores of the subtests, declarative knowledge and text knowledge in the SLI children were significantly lower than those in normal children, but the subtests score of language knowledge did not differ between the two groups. Furthermore, significantly lower scores were observed in the SLI group in theme correlations in the subsets of declarative knowledge, vocabulary diversity in the subsets of text knowledge, and tense in the subsets of language knowledge; (2) in the analysis of the total score of strategic knowledge, there was no significant difference between the two groups, but in the analysis of subset score, the SLI group showed lower scores in the proper length assessment; and (3) in the analysis of the tacit knowledge, there was no significant difference in the total scores and subset scores between the two groups.
Discussion & Conclusion
The results of this study suggest that there are some differences between writing of normal children and that of children with SLI and thus, there should be a specialized program in treating children with SLI. Further studies regarding the writing knowledge of SLI need to be implemented and specialized intervention programs which are more appropriate to the characteristics of SLI are recommended.