| The purpose of this study was to identify sensitive indices that can be used for written language assessment of Taiwanese youth in the areas of syntax and semantics. Four written prompts, two in the narrative mode and two in the expository mode, were utilized to elicit four written language samples per student. A scoring manual, developed by the investigator, was explicitly designed for scorers who were not linguists. Written language samples from 108 subjects (36 in each level of language achievement) were scored in both language domains, syntax, and semantics, based on 28 potential indices.;With respect to the semantic domain, results indicated that five factors used to measure vocabulary size (i.e., total characters, different words, mature characters, mature words, and corrected type token ratio) can best differentiate vocabulary maturity among the groups. The findings also provided evidence that using characters as a unit to measure the vocabulary size or sentence length has the same reliability as that measured by words. In addition, greater use of idioms in written texts appears to be characteristic of language proficiency during preadolescence.;This study offers an overview of written language assessment of preadolescents. However, much work is still needed to discover meaningful ways of measuring children's language production in the school-aged period and interpreting of the results of language sample analysis. It would be interesting to conduct a longitudinal study of students (follow the same students through preadolescence and adolescence) in order to gain a better understanding of what really is happening on an individual basis.;The results indicated there was not a significant difference in the total number of sentences written across the three levels; however, a significant difference was found in the number or proportion of the complexity of sentence structures used (i.e., Type I sentences: containing only one independent clause; Type V sentences: a sentence containing three or more clauses with at least one or more conjunctions to link them). Sentence length, measured either by characters or words, was found to be the best index to differentiate between the three groups regarding syntactic complexity of a written sample. |
