Developing a Story Retelling Test for the Assessment of Language Structure in Persian-Speaking Children

Background and Aim: Valid identification, prevention, and treatment of language disorders have a high priority for the clinicians. Story retelling is a method for studying language development which isfaster than other procedures in implementing and analyzing, and has a reliable scoring system. The aim of this project is to construct story retelling test for assessing language structure in 6-7 year old,Persian children.Methods: An appropriate story for 6-7 year old children was written by the help of a speech pathologist, a linguist, and a novelist. The validity of the constructed story was checked by 14 experts.Then related pictures were design and their validity was examined. The test was conducted on 72 children (36 girls, 36 boys) of 6-7 years. The reliability was administered with a test-retest design witha two week interval. The reliability of the scoring system was evaluated with inter-rater method.Results: Content validity index for this test was 89%, interclass correlation was 83%, and standard error of measurement was 2.76. The interclass correlation for scoring system was 93% and Pearson’scorrelation was 90%. Correlation of the test-retest scores was statistically significant (p<0.01).Conclusion: This story retelling test has appropriate validity and reliability. It is suitable for quick assessment of language structure in 6-7 year old, Persian children.