title: The use of the Renfrew Bus Story with 5-8-year-old Australian children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  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.
  
  
  METHODS
  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.
  
  
  RESULTS
  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.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  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.
authors: School of Allied Health Sciences, Griffith University , Gold Coast, QLD , Australia.
authors: Marleen F
authors: MF
authors: Westerveld
authors: Kath
authors: K
authors: Vidler
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D007807:Language Tests / Q000592:standards; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011793:Queensland; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013066:Speech-Language Pathology / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Bus Story; Frog Where Are You; language sample analysis; school-age children; story retelling