Detección de las dificultades lingüísticas expresivas en la edad escolar

Resumen

Less severe linguistic difficulties are often detected in the classroom, by teachers who feel overworked. These difficulties are related to negative results for curriculum development. The main objective is to investigate whether it is possible to offer teachers a brief screening technique that helps them detect language problems (comprehensive and expressive). In two exploratory studies, chain referral sampling, participated 96 children between 3 and 9 years (M=6.03; SD=1.42) and 16 teachers between 30 and 56 years (M=41.25; SD=7.22). In Study 1, we examined the accuracy of teachers on expressive and receptive difficulties. Results showed that teachers showed more accurate judgments about expression difficulties. After inferential and correlational analyses, we selected those items with better psychometric properties to construct a brief scale. In Study 2 we validated the brief scale, and in line with the previous study, results showed that the brief scale has good psychometric properties (Cronbach’s Alpha= 0.96). We developed and validated a simplified version of the scale of observation that could be a useful screening tool to detect effectively and rapidly linguistic problems in children.