The Differences in English Sentence Repetition Performance between Chinese High School Students at Risk for Language Disorder and Typically-developing Peers

School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, 10080, Beijing, China

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) causes harms to patients and the risk for getting DLD can be seen in many students. In Chinese exam-oriented education, students are facing enormous difficulties in L2 learning because of the risk of developmental language disorder, which warrants research. Previous studies mostly use Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) as a clinical marker and seldom seldom examine aspects such as error types and syntactic breakdowns, not to mention Chinese high school context. This research aims at finding the differences in English SRT performance between Chinese high school students at risk and typically-developing peers, revealing the predictive factors of SRT performance. It was done in Zhejiang province, applying questionnaire and SRT. The finding is that the at-risk group perform significantly poorer than TD group, and the higher the syntactic complexity of the task, the more obvious differences are. The risk for speaking disorder shows the strongest predictive power while the reading disorder risk shows the weakest.