The Development of a Syntactic Awareness Task using the Word-Order Correction Paradigm

This poster described the development of a Syntactic Awareness task that stemmed from a larger project exploring the possible interplay of the psycholinguistic and cognitive predictors of reading comprehension in British and Chinese children. A word-order correction paradigm, ie. rearranging the fragmented words or phrases into logical and meaningful sentences (Brimo et al., 2017; Cain, 2007; Nation & Snowling, 2000), was adopted in the development of the measurement. Based on Nation and Snowling’s (2000) findings, items were developed with varying degree of syntactic complexity (the grammatical structure of the sentences) and semantic ambiguity (the possible correct combinations of the words) by adapting the materials from their study. The instrument was administered to a group of Year 5 and 6 children. Reliability was established using Cronbach’s Alpha, split-half reliability, inter-rater reliability, and composite reliability. The findings indicated the suitability of this six-item instrument as a measure of Syntactic Awareness.