nicole kotras masters thesis

Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
the testing were trained so that a consistent administrative and scoring procedure
was followed. The examiners were trained by the same Griffiths user and thus were
approximately equally experienced in administering the revised pictures.
This stage involved the administration of the revised set of pictures to a
representative sample of the population of children, between 60 and 83 months of
age. Administration of the large revised pictures and the 20 small revised pictures
took place in an environment conducive to testing. The research members involved
in the testing phase were all given stipulated guidelines to follow in the administration
of the pictures in an attempt to eliminate any inconsistencies in this phase of the
study. Jensen (1980) suggested that an examiner, who is fluent in the subject's
home language and it's particular local expression, should test the subjects.
Weisleider and Hodgson (1989) proposed that the stimuli of both speech and
language discrimination tests should be suitable for the linguistic background of the
subjects and should also be administered in their home language. The children in
this study were assessed in their home language (English, Afrikaans or Xhosa). See
Appendix F, for the Xhosa and Afrikaans translations of the English instructions in
administrating the large and small pictures of the Hearing and Speech Scale (Allan,
1988; Griffiths, 1970).
This stage involved the collection of data. The responses received from the 20 small
pictures and the large picture were scored according to stipulated guidelines
provided by Griffiths (1970). The large pictures were scored in four ways. The first
measurement involves the child naming an age-appropriate number of stimuli in the
picture. The second measurement involves the child using descriptive words
(adjectives and adverbs); thirdly using descriptive sentences of 6+ syllables; and
finally the child's use of personal and possessive pronouns. The data were then
captured in a spreadsheet computer package.
This stage involved the statistical analysis of the data.
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