Choice of subjects for the Recorded Text Test

2.2.2 Choice of subjects for the Recorded Text Test

Our selection of subjects was not random. In each village location we tested students in the last year of the primary school cycle CM2. This choice of subjects has been used successfully in Burkina Faso for several years, and for several reasons is helpful to eliminate some variables which may alter the outcome of the Recorded Text Test. First, the testing procedure for the Recorded Text Test is difficult to understand for those unaccustomed to a question-answer test method. Choosing young people with six years of schooling both facilitated the administration of the test, and reduced the possibility that low scores would be due to unfamiliarity with the test-taking procedure. Second, students of the CM2 level are generally 12-15 years of age: old enough to have a mature understanding of their own language, but young enough to be unlikely to have traveled outside their native dialect area. Third, we found that by testing school children we were assured that they would be available during the day, and not out in the fields away from the village, or on some other errands. Finally, children in a formal schooling environment and with a teacher who is generally not startled by the presence of foreigners, are less likely to be so frightened in the presence of strangers that they cannot perform well on the test. Each student was screened before taking the RTT to ensure that he or she was a native speaker of the dialect in the target village, that his parents were also from this speech community, that he had not spent large amounts of time outside of the village. In addition, the short “teaching text” played before the actual recorded texts was used to screen candidates who for some reason were unable to catch on to the test method. In Bardouga we did have some difficulty in finding enough CM2 students to test, and so also tested two adolescents of approximately the same age, but who had had no formal schooling. The unschooled subjects scores fell within the range of the students scores.

2.2.3 Choice of subjects for interview schedules