(EQS) Early Question Skills
Joan S. Kissel
Ages: 4 years and up
Administration: Individual or Group
Early Question Skills (EQS) is a companion text to Question Cognition. It presents early question skills for the student who is not able to respond appropriately to questions presented in Question Cognition. EQS is concerned with helping the child deal with communication breakdowns which occur. It is appropriate for students with very low language or disordered language.
It may also be used with students who are learning English as a Second Language.
Test Structure:
The EQS consists of 43 work sheets and 21 pages from Question Cognition. It may be used in therapy situations and then sent home as homework sheets. EQS presents the early question words of who, what, which one, is and how after the establishment of the semantic information in the question.
For example, when a child is asked, “Who has the ice cream cone?”, the child will point to the ice cream cone. It is the vocabulary coming at the end of the question which triggers the response. When asked, “Who?”, the child becomes confused and again points to the ice cream cone. The question has not been answered.
EQS establishes vocabulary levels for semantic knowledge prior to the presentation of the
question form, presents early printed word recognition skills and early question words. It teaches the student to listen for labels, functions, attributes, and factual information.