Assessments, Screeners & Intervention
Monitoring, Screening & Assessing Examples
Formal Measures of Vocabulary Knowledge – Standardised Assessments
Standardised measures of vocabulary can allow you to compare a child’s general vocabulary knowledge with norms for their age range.
These assessments are generally administered by a speech pathologist, special education teacher, or allied health professional who is trained in administering them.
Standardised assessment measures are generally part of a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) process. Often these students have been flagged earlier by the teacher or parent/ caregiver and have participated in Tiered Intervention support programs without adequate progression. Examples:
- Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 5th ed. (PPVT-5; Dunn, 2018)
- Expressive Vocabulary Test 3rd ed. (EVT-3; Williams, 2018)
- Receptive and Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Tests 4th ed. (ROWPVT-4 and EOWPVT-4; Brownell, 2010)
- Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Australian and New Zealand 5th ed. (CELF-5 A&NZ) Screening Test* (Wiig et al., 2017)
What measure does your school use to assess vocabulary knowledge?
Curriculum Based Measures
General assessment measures do not generally allow teachers to see growth in a students’ knowledge of vocabulary explicitly taught.
To measure growth an assessment designed by the teacher, for this specific purpose, would need to be administered before and after a teaching block to measure progress.
Younger Students (example)
‘Tell me everything you know about ______. What does the word ______ mean?’
(for 4- to 5-year-old children)
‘Tell me the best sentence you can using the word ______. Tell me a sentence with the word _____.’ (for 6- to 7-year-old children)
Picture naming (children label pictures for 1 min)
Older students (example):
Give their own response: Write about a time you were perplexed.
Respond to word in context: When Father heard that Lisa had ripped up the letter from Steve, he commended her for it. What do you think Father thought of Steve?.
Checklists of taught words & Rating scales: Ask the student what a word means and rate definitions on a scale. Keep track of responses to questions about words in a lesson targeting vocabulary.
0 = no knowledge of the word meaning
1 = knows something about the word or provides a partial definition or example
2 = understands the word, provides a full definition, and uses the word in an example
Observation
Teachers may find that the best ‘measure’ of the success of vocabulary instruction is simply their general observations of how students’ oral participation and written capabilities are improving
Ready-Made High-Quality Screeners and Assessments
- OxEd & Assessment | Evidence-based oral language solutions | OxEd & Assessment
- CUBED – Language Dynamics Group
- DIBELS 8th Edition: Australasian Version Materials | DIBELS®
- Reading Assessments, Tools, and Resources | Acadience Learning
Links to Explicit Vocabulary Instruction, Professional Learning & Resources
Vocabulary Resources
Melissa Lori Vocabulary Instruction
Episode 220 Teacher – Tested Vocabulary Strategies (!t Grade Teacher/ Literacy Coach)
Episode 156 Vocabulary Instruction with Sean Morrisey (5th grade teacher)
Episode 155 Language for Life Lyn Stone
Episode 219 Ten Vocabulary Move Backed by Research with Blythe Anderson
Episode 203 Strengthening Language Comprehension in Young Learners with Tricia Zucker and Sonia Cabell
Episode 218 Building Better Academic talk Routines in the K-8 Classroom
Episode 217 Research- Backed Strategies for Academic Talk with Jeff Zwiers
Episode 167 The Relationship Between Phonics and Language Comprehension with Tiffany Hogan
Teacher-Tested Vocabulary Strategies Episodes | literacypodcast
#scienceofreading #reading #read #teachers #teach #writing #write… |
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™
Ten Vocabulary Moves Backed by Research with Blythe Anderson
Reading Rockets
Vocabulary – YouTube (Link to Vocabulary Instruction videos)
Previewing Vocabulary Before Reading | Reading Rockets
Reading Rockets: Launching Young Readers
Lyn Stone https://youtu.be/rzqrtlJPW6A
Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning | Reading Rockets
National Centre of Improving Literacy
AAL https://www.improvingliteracy.org/
Australian Research Papers
Vocabulary Instruction: Strategies for the Classroom
Emma Mc Clean How to teach vocabulary for reading comprehension
Word Lists
https://pubs.asha.org/doi/pdf/10.1044/2024_LSHSS-24-00021?download=true
Academic Word Lists https://textproject.org/wp-content/uploads/resources/Academic-word-list.pdf
Qld Department of Education:
Vocabulary instruction – introduction
https://youtu.be/0bzSmPN8M5Y?list=PLgjv5epyrnQDRvo72rdcpz0PKpYbyckkp
https://youtu.be/0bzSmPN8M5Y?si=02ukvUwdOj7P_eYB
Vocabulary instruction – putting it into practice
https://youtu.be/rfhISChT2e4?si=_Ng_81gxPj7EYV03
https://youtu.be/rfhISChT2e4?list=PLgjv5epyrnQDRvo72rdcpz0PKpYbyckkp
Vocabulary instruction – supporting all learners
https://youtu.be/v4zJLl3rx0E?list=PLgjv5epyrnQDRvo72rdcpz0PKpYbyckkp
https://youtu.be/v4zJLl3rx0E?si=Y54fB6bBrmd-H74T
APM Reports: What the Words Say
UFLI
education.ufl.edu/patterson/files/2020/05/Narrowing-the-Third-Grade-Reading-Gap.pdf
Florida Center of Reading
Florida Center for Reading Research
Routines | Florida Center for Reading Research
Instructional Routines | Florida Center for Reading Research
Module 2: Explicit Vocabulary Instruction | Florida Center for Reading Research
Video 9: Academic Vocabulary in Text (REL Southeast)
Links to further resources and Professional Learning
Vocabulary Instruction
Lyn Stone Free Videos / Webinars & Downloads (Lifelong Literacy)
[Listen Again] Language for Li – Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™ – Apple Podcasts
Language for Life by Lyn Stone
Free Videos – Lifelong Literacy Lyn Stone – YouTube
Free Webinars – Lifelong Literacy
Free Downloads – Lifelong Literacy
Recommended Reading – Lifelong Literacy
The Writing Revolution
The Writing Revolution – Empower teachers to help students
The Writing Revolution Ep 117 Podcast (Melissa and Lori Love Literacy)
Example Vocabulary lessons
Vocabulary Instruction: Strategies for the Classroom
Explicit Vocabulary Routine in the classroom https://youtu.be/kBqnCHzfkU8
National Centre for Intensive Intervention Handouts
Planning Standards Aligned Instruction within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports: Vocabulary Example
Lesson Plan: Word Knowledge: Semantic Feature Analysis
Keys to Literacy Free Resources – Keys to Literacy
Effective Vocabulary Instruction: A Combination of Direct and Indirect Instruction on Vimeo
Webinar: Developing Oral Language to Support Early Literacy Instruction, May, 2021.mp4 on Vimeo
Embedding Vocabulary & Comprehension in All Subjects 4-12 on Vimeo
Five from Five Morphology and comprehension strategies – Five from Five
Wordworkkingston Home
https://www.wordworkskingston.com/WordWorks/Home.html
Constructing a morphological matrix from word sums: A door to understanding of English spelling
Resources
- List-Group-Label | Reading Rockets
- Literacy Hub Planning resources
- Professional Learning
- Education isn’t natural – that’s why it’s hard – David Didau
- MyCISpaper (1).pdf K Hempenstall
- ACER Unpacking the science of reading research Greta Rollo and Kellie Picker June 2024 viewcontent.cgi
-
Florida Dept Ed Vocabulary Resources.pdf
Castle, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in Public Interest, 19, 5-51.
Glossary
Discourse: Connected speech.
Mental lexicon: Words in long-term memory that are recognised and used in spoken or written language.
Morpheme: The smallest meaningful part of a word.
Morphology: Refers to the linguistic structure of words, with specific respect to how words may be broken up into meaningful parts (morphemes).
Phonology: The system governing the speech sound patterns that exist in a spoken language.
Semantic: Related to word meanings.
Semantic network: A structure that shows how concepts or words are related and interconnected.
Simple View of Reading: A theory that describes reading comprehension as the product of both word recognition and language/listening comprehension.
Syntactic bootstrapping: A theory that explains how children learn word meanings by using the structure of language.
Syntax: The grammatical structure of a sentence.
Vocabulary: Knowledge of words’ meanings.
Vocabulary breadth: The size of a person’s vocabulary, or the number of words they know.
Vocabulary depth: The quality of knowledge for each word in a person’s vocabulary.