SHELL: Oral Language and Early Literacy Skills in Kindergarten and First-Grade Children

TLDR

Learning to read is complex and requires diverse prerequisite language and literacy skills. This article reports on a battery of oral language and early literacy tests, called the SHELL. The SHELL battery includes oral language tasks (narrative production, picture description, definitions, superordinates), comprehension, vocabulary, and early literacy measures, and provides scoring systems and performance data from the Home‑School Study of Language and Literacy Development. Descriptive, correlational, and predictive analyses of SHELL‑K and SHELL‑1 scores are presented.

Abstract

Abstract Since learning to read is a complex process, there are a diverse set of prerequisite skills, including both language and literacy related skills. This article reports on a battery of oral language and early literacy tests, called the SHELL. The battery contains measures of oral language development (a narrative production task, a picture description task, a definitions task, and a superordinates task), as well as comprehension, vocabulary, and early literacy measures (both emergent literacy and early reading and spelling.) In addition to presenting the tasks and the scoring systems for the SHELL, we also provide information about performance on these tasks by participants in the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, a longitudinal project that is collecting interview, interactional, and outcome data on low-income children from age three to age ten at home and at school. Descriptive, correlational, and predictive analyses based on scores for SHELL-K (when the children were five years old) and SHELL-1 (when the children were in first grade) are presented.