Development of a Screening Test for the Early Identification of Japanese Children with Difficulties Learning English: A Preliminary Study

OBJECTIVES: In Japan, there is no established method to assess the ability to read and write in English. To address this problem, we sought to develop a screening test for the early detection of students who show difficulties in reading and writing in English. METHODS: The participants were 425 fifth- and sixth-grade elementary school students and 526 first- through third-grade junior high school students. While setting up the task items, we focused on the assessment of visual information processing ability related to letter-symbol information processing. Q1 was a letter identification task, Q2 was a letter recognition task, Q3 was a discrimination task, Q4 was a lexical decision task, Q5 was a semantic comprehension task, Q6 was a meaningful sentence copy task, and Q7 was a nonsensical sentence copy task. Q1 to Q5 assessed reading ability and Q6 and Q7 assessed writing ability. RESULTS: The comparison of basic distribution between elementary and junior high school showed that there were differences in the distribution of both reading and writing scores between the two school types (P<0.05). At the cut-off value of −1.5 SD, 7.8% of the students were extracted for reading scores and 4.2%–5.5% for writing scores. CONCLUSIONS: The extraction rate of students using this screening test supports the results of previously published studies. Thus, this screening test is considered suitable for identifying elementary and junior high school students who face difficulties in reading and writing in English.