AN INVESTIGATION OF THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF SELECTED ASPECTS OF ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE

Proficiency in oral and written language is considered by many professional educators to be of paramount importance for achieving academic success. For many years there has been an assumption that interrelationships do exist between oral and written language. Currently the existence or nature of assumed interrelationships of oral and written language is irresolute. School systems are, by nature, heavily language-oriented. Consequently, the determination of the exact nature of the relationship of oral and written language has great import for the instructional practices in the educational system. It is the intent of this study to empirically investigate the nature and/or existence of interrelationships of oral and written language; and to determine whether groups rated high and low in written language performance differ significantly on measures of oral language.;The results of the statistical analyses indicated that a moderate to strong relationship did exist between the total scores of oral and written measures utilized in this study. Relationships also existed between specific language components of morphology, syntax, and semantics as measured by subtests on the TOLD, TORC, and the TOWL with the syntactic component having the highest relationship. The semantic component appeared to be the least reliable aspect of the interrrelationship between oral and written language. In addition, the TOLD, a measure of oral language, was able to effectively discriminate between groups rated high and low in written language proficiency. No significant interaction was present.;Subjects were 77 eight- and nine-year-olds enrolled in third grade classrooms. Any child who was repeating third grade or who qualified for special education was excluded from the study. Three standardized instruments were administered to the subjects: the Test of Language Development (TOLD) (Newcomer & Hammill, 1977), the Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC) (Brown, Hammill, & Wiederholdt, 1978), and the Test of Written Language (TOWL) (Hammill & Larsen, 1978). Data resulting from the administration of these instruments were subjected to a series of correlational procedures. To examine the existence and nature of interrelationships of oral and written language, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients and a multiple regression formula were computed using the total and subtest scores on the TOLD, TORC, and TOWL. A two-way analysis of variance was performed to determine whether the TOLD effectively discriminates between groups rated high and low in written language performance as measured by the TORC and the TOWL.