The use of the Renfrew Bus Story with 5-8-year-old Australian children.

PURPOSE: Research into the language sampling practices of Australian speech pathologists suggests the Bus Story Test is a frequently used standardized tool for eliciting story retelling samples for screening, diagnosis, goal-setting, and progress monitoring purposes. Because this task has not been normed on an Australian population, this study investigated the usefulness of the Bus Story for young school-age Australian children.

METHOD: In total, 125 Australian primary-school children (aged 5;3-8;9) participated in the Bus Story task. Children attending Year 2 also retold the story Frog Where Are You. Children's performance was analysed for measures of information and sentence length (Bus Story only), story length, MLU, number of different words and clausal density.

RESULT: Performance on the Bus Story improved with year-of-schooling for all measures. Between 21-64% of the children performed below expectations on information or length scores when using the published norms. The retell task Frog Where Are You elicited longer samples, containing a higher number of different words.

CONCLUSION

Using the published Bus Story norms will potentially result in over- identification of language impairment. The retell task Frog Where Are You may provide a useful alternative for assessing young school-aged children's story retelling ability.