Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language
Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language - Design a Compelling Intervention Plan
Functional assessments for literacy and language.
A functional literacy and language assessment creates a clear picture of your students' learning profiles, what the barriers to progress are and what needs to be done next.
In short, functional assessments are a key to understanding what your students do well in respect to language and literacy skills, and perhaps most importantly, the oral and written language areas they struggle with the most in real world settings.
Standardized tests can only really tell part of the story. To truly support our students' literacy and learning, we need to understand how students understand and use language, where it impacts most: in the classroom, and the barriers students' with language difficulties have accessing the curriculum.
Functional assessments have the benefit of shining a light on your students' most pressing learning challenges and create meaningful opportunities for targeted intervention.
In a recent publication, Professor Geraldine Wallach and Assistant Professor Ocampo outline 5 principles of assessment for speech-language pathologists to follow:
- Understand the difference between identifying a student for services and creating and implementing an intervention program.
- Avoid the teach-to-the-test trap.
- Observe language abilities under different situations that mey stress the system.
- Collect spoken and written samples.
- Observe in the contexts in which students must survive and thrive.
Wallach and Ocampo make the point that effective school-age language assessment requires a clear distinction between identifying a student for services and designing and implementing an intervention.
Standardized assessments play a key role in eligibility decisions, but are quite limited in scope and speech pathologists should not rely upon them as the only means of language assessment. Standardized tests fail to reflect the complexities of language use in an academic sense and the impact that language has on student life.
In that spirit we need to go beyond mere test scores and instead detail how a student uses language in the real-world of a classroom environment.
Functional, dynamic and curriculum-based assessments, observations, added with oral and written language samples are essential keys to understand a student's strengths and needs in real life contexts.
In addition, a direct and compelling intervention plan that is tailored, context-driven, and aligned with classroom expectations implemented with fidelity has a better chance of achieving real outcomes.
Such a plan focuses on actively and purposely building a student's language skills that efficiently support learning across all subject areas.
Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language - Avoid the Teach to the Test Trap
Wallach cautions against the “teach-to-the-test” trap, where the focus narrows to performance on specific test items rather than broader, functional language use.
The emphasis of assessment should not be to improve test scores but instead must shape meaningful and achievable goals for intervention.
Moreover, assessments aligned with intervention goals help speech pathologists understand how a student’s language abilities impact their ability to cope with classroom demands.
Include in an assessment suite tasks that examine students' ability to follow directions, comprehend curriculum content, express ideas in writing, and participate in classroom discourse.
Assessments that shine a light on students' real-world instructional challenges, are critical when designing interventions that authentically support educational success.
Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language - Stress the Language System
Assess language abilities in situations that "stress the system"—that is, unfamiliar contexts that stretch a student’s language processing.
Push the student's language system in an effort to reveal subtle breakdowns not always evident in structured, low-demand assessments.
This assessment approach provides a more authentic picture of how a student's language skills function under academic pressure.
For example, tasks like requiring a student to produce an oral narrative without a visual or linguistic model can greatly test a student’s ability to efficiently organize and retrieve language.
In a related way, asking students to respond to curly inferential questions about an unfamiliar but age appropriate topic can stretch a student's oral comprehension abilities and invites expressive breakdown.
Tasks such as these can quickly reveal vulnerabilities in higher-level language functions such as planning, organising thoughts and inferencing.
By observing this breakdown, speech pathologists can more accurately identify the linguistic framework of a student's classroom struggles and design interventions that support real-world classroom communication.
Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language - Collect Spoken and Written Samples
Wallach stresses the importance of assembling both spoken and written language samples as part of a broader language assessment package.
In the typical school classroom, written language is a central feature of learning and a pivotal key when students express their understanding of curricular themes and content.
By analyzing students’ written output, clinicians quickly gauge how students generate written language when cognitive and linguistic demands are high.
Targeted written language tasks are designed to stress a student's language system and provide insight about difficulties not always clear in oral language tasks alone.
It's important at this point to underscore the reciprocal partnership between spoken and written language. As students develop during the school years, their written language increasingly influences the complexity and structure of spoken language.
Collect both spoken and written language samples. Gain a thorough and detailed account of a student’s language challenges that generates accurate diagnosis to better inform the development of interventions aligned with real and pressing academic demands.
Functional Assessments for Literacy and Language - Classroom Observation
Observation of a child’s interaction with curricular content and the teaching environment is a key principle of assessment.
The clinician's task is to look for signs of understanding, difficulty, or confusion in a student to identify areas where the child may need additional support or instruction.
Also observe how the classroom teacher delivers content, adapts to diverse learning needs, and uses different teaching strategies in a non-judgemental way.
Teacher practice and the effectiveness of a pedagogical approach is critical in gaining student attention, particularly when the student has receptive language difficulties.
Classroom observation provides a clearer understanding of a student’s educational experience, helping adapting teacher instruction to a student's individual needs.
Reference
Wallach, G.P. & Ocampo, A. Language and Literacy Connections: Intervention for School-Age Children and Adolescents Plural Publishing Inc
UPDATED 04/2025
