ABSTRACT
This chapter explains language assessment and aims to answer the question about how regulatory processes are reflected in language behavior. It discusses language behaviors as they are employed by children for regulating behaviors–their own behaviors and the behaviors of others. Awareness of the principles of both autoregulation and social regulation, then, will be the focus for applying a feedback model to language measurement. Language is restricted to the structural features that can be subjected to formal testing. Other aspects of language, such as communication, semantics, and so forth, are not considered less important, but the central issues in language assessment can be illustrated adequately with recourse only to grammatical features. A common approach is to compare language test behavior with naturalistic samples of children's speech under standard conditions in a variety of contexts. The number of clauses per sentence may be taken as an index of the complexity of children's language.
