Abstract:
Pre-IPT was developed to assess the oral English language proficiency of pre-school children in this country whose home language is not English. It may be used with children who are 3, 4, and 5 years of age and is intended to help educators assess the language needs of children before they enter school so that an intervention program can be implemented before the child reaches the academic classroom. It tests four basic areas of oral language proficiency: Vocabulary, Comprehension, Syntax, and Verbal Expression. As the administration of the test progresses, children advance through as many of five levels as they can before reaching the ceiling of their proficiency. The Pre-IPT is administered individually and generally takes about 8 minutes. Ideally, it should be administered by a professional educator who is strongly bilingual. Testing involves a display of story pieces on a board. These pieces include a family, some pets, a picnic table, trees, birthday presents, etc. The examiner arranges the pieces in several different ways and asks the child a series of scripted questions about them. The child's answers are recorded as "correct" or "incorrect" on an answer sheet by the examiner. The test materials include a "Level Summary" sheet that describes the skills a child would have at each level, and which is suitable for reporting to parents. Information about reliability and validity is present in the technical manual, but is not part of the EAC East collection.