A description of shared linguistic meaning among education practitioners : implications for the role of school psychologists

The study described the shared linguistic characteristics of six education practitioner groups, including resource teachers, school psychologists, principals, and three classroom teacher groups divided according to years teaching experience: 1-5 years, 6-10 years, 1l and more years. Word associations to five work-related stimulus terms were collected from 180 Ss, 30 in each group; these associations were submitted to analyses to measure linguistic overlap among groups, technical accuracy in defining the terms, and linguistic overlaps within groups.

The six groups were compared among themselves on these measures to ascertain the extent to which various groups and various group pairs experienced language similarity on work concepts related to traditional education and to school psychology.

Findings suggested that school psychologists showed the least overall language similarity with other groups; resource teachers and principals evidenced the most. School psychologists showed more language similarity with other groups when controlling for the technical accuracy of the associations but were below resource teachers, principals, and 6-l0 year teachers on this measure. School psychologists were better than classroom teachers in providing technically accurate associations to stimulus terms germane to the work of school psychology but were not consistently superior to resource teachers and principals. Clder classroom teachers were below the four other groups in technically defining the stimulus terms.

The stimulus term "school psychologist" produced differences in the frequency of associations to content categories entitled "tester" iv

and "consultant." To "tester"' school psychologists contributed only two of a total of 35 associations but produced 15 of 32 associations to "consultant," indicating that school psychologists' perceptions of their role differs from the perceptions of other groups.

In measures of language congruency within each individual group, school psychologists ranked below all groups. . This contradicted the common assumption that school psychologists have an internal language well understood among themselves but foreign and strange to other practitioners.

Although the limited context of the study precluded a definitive interpretation of the results, some definite patterns among the groups emerged. Taking the measures of linguistic similarity among the groups as an index of communication potential (and capacity) among groups, of all groups, school psychologists ranked lowest in overall communication potential. Resource teachers, principals, and to a lesser extent mid-experienced teachers showed the most communication potential. Older classroom teachers were near school psychologists in overall communication potential but were much higher with other classroom teachers and with principals than with other groups. School psychologists exhibited far more communication potential with resource teachers and principals than with the teacher groups.