Thoughts of a secondary school SLT

Tag: curriculum based language assessment

  • Language assessment at secondary school: Student-focused, dynamic and curriculum-based assessment (Part 2)

    In my last post of this 3 part series on assessment – https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/07/08/language-assessment-at-secondary-school-challenges-and-solutions/ – I talked about the challenges of assessing students at secondary level. In this post, I wanted to share a few approaches that I’ve found particularly useful in my practice.

    Student-focused assessment

    You are likely to be familiar with a number of informal assessment measures already used routinely with other client groups, such as client, parent and teacher interviews, as well as classroom observations. One tool I have found particularly useful is a self-assessment checklist sourced from Paul and Norbury (2012, p.541), which I use as the basis for a student interview.

    This assessment lists a number of skills relevant for accessing the secondary school curriculum in a table. It includes items such as “understanding teachers’ lectures”, “finding main ideas in textbooks”, “participating in class discussions”, “taking notes” and “finding time to finish my work”. Students are asked to rate themselves on these skills, ticking either, “I’m good”, “I’m ok”, “I get by”, “I need some help” or “Aah! Help! Help!” (Paul and Norbury, 2012, p.541).

    I have found this to be an invaluable tool for gaining an insight into my students’ understanding of their own difficulties. The checklist can then be compared with their teachers’ views, as well as any formal test scores. Any areas of difficulty can be explored further by getting students to give examples and tell stories of times when they struggled with those specific behaviours. This is often incredibly revealing.

    I have found that beginning the assessment with this checklist also helps to motivate my students, since its relevance to their daily lives is immediately clear. In terms of motivation, Scott and Balthazar (2013) also recommend explaining to your students what you are going to assess, as well as why and how, rather than simply administering the test without explanation.

    You might be surprised at what a difference this student-focused approach can make. I began doing this in earnest a few years ago. Rather than giving a generic explanation, I would refer back to their checklist, saying things like, “You told me that you need a lot of help with understanding your teacher’s lectures. Well, this test looks at your listening skills. It will help me to understand why you are finding your teacher’s lectures hard.”

    There was a noticeable difference in my students’ motivation when I did this: both during the assessment and beyond. I think they could see how the assessment was relevant to the very real difficulties they were experiencing, and why it was important they try their best.

    Dynamic Assessment

    Something else you are likely to be aware of but is still worth mentioning is dynamic assessment. Less a type of test than a philosophy, it is based on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development: the gap between what a learner can accomplish on her own and what she can do with support.

    So whilst traditional assessments do not allow examiners to provide any support (as this would invalidate the standardised scores), dynamic assessment is an interactive process between learner and instructor, focusing on the learning process, rather than the product. The idea is to support learners to complete a given task by teaching strategies, providing modelling and scaffolding that enable them to achieve more than they could alone. A test-teach-retest structure may be used, or it can be less formal than this.

    Dynamic assessment allows us a deeper insight into our students’ learning processes than a traditional test does. It helps us to understand how our students may respond to intervention and the types of strategies that are likely to help them.

    It is very possible to use the approach alongside a formal assessment to gather qualitative information once standardised scores have been computed. When I worked for the NHS, we regularly used it alongside the CELF-5 to work out which strategies most helped particular students. These would then be compiled into lists to be passed onto the teaching staff supporting those students.

    It can also be useful for determining the exact nature of a student’s difficulties when a task relies on a wide range of skills. A poor score on the Understanding Spoken Paragraphs subtest of the CELF-5, for example, may indicate a difficulty with focusing, auditory memory, vocabulary, understanding of sentence structures or text cohesion devices, or higher level skills such as prediction and inferencing.

    Simply computing the student’s scores according to the test manual will give me limited insight into their unique difficulties. But if we read the paragraphs again together, if I probe difficult vocabulary, ask them to paraphrase complex sentences, and rephrase tricky sentences myself as well as asking them what they found difficult about it, then I will get a much better idea.

    Curriculum-Based Language Assessment (CBLA)

    Standardised assessments have also been critiqued for being “decontextualized” and disconnected from real-life language demands. They give us little information about how students process increasingly complex academic language, or how to plan intervention (Nippold, 2023).

    One potential solution to these problems is CBLA. Pioneered by Nickola Wolf Nelson in the 1980s and 90s, generic curriculum-based assessment (CBA) approaches are adapted to focus more specifically on language. So whilst CBA tasks are often constructed by teachers to test how well a student is learning the course content and whether there are any problems, CBLA assesses whether they have the language skills to do so.

    More specifically, CBLA aims to identify the language demands of the school curriculum by using content and materials drawn directly from it. At the same time, it seeks to understand how well a student is using their linguistic knowledge, skills and strategies to access that content (Nelson, 1998). Any mismatch can be used for determining a student’s intervention needs.

    CBLA may involve collecting several types of data, including artifact analysis, classroom observations and participant observations (Nelson, 1998). The former has sometimes been referred to as “portfolio analysis”, since it involves gathering together a “portfolio” of the student’s work.

    This might include lecture notes, classwork, completed projects and written assignments. Students’ work could be analysed for use of vocabulary, sentence structures and organisation, and compared to that of students who are not struggling. Written instructions could also be analysed for complex vocabulary and sentence structures. This “portfolio” of pieces can even be kept as a way of measuring progress later on.

    A lesser known version of a classroom observation is called a “participant observation”. Both involve observing the student. But whilst a classroom observation involves watching from afar, in participant observation, the assessor sits beside the student as they attempt a curriculum task. They act as “co-conspirator” (Nelson, 1998, p402) and attempt to work out the problem with the student.

    A kind of dynamic assessment, participant observation allows the instructor to see at close hand how the student attempts the task. What are the linguistic demands? Are there difficulties with any words or sentences? Is the student using any strategies? What other obstacles come up? Such an activity could easily take place in an isolated clinic room if embarrassment is a factor. You could even ask their teacher for the classwork they would miss by coming to your session, and complete it together.

    To read about more ideas for assessing students at secondary level, including language sample and grammaticality judgment tasks, please click here for my last post in this series: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/07/16/language-assessment-at-secondary-school-language-sampling-and-other-ideas-part-3/

    Notes

    Nelson, N. W. (1998) Childhood Language Disorders in Context: Infancy Through Adolescence. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

    Nippold, M.A. (2023). Grammar guide for speech-language pathologists: Steps to analyzing complex syntax. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

    Scott, Cheryl M., and Catherine H. Balthazar. 2013. “The Role of Complex Sentence Knowledge in Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties.” Perspectives on Language and Literacy 39 (3): 18–30. [1, 2]

  • Language assessment at secondary school: challenges and solutions (Part 1)

    Assessment can be challenging at any age, but especially so at secondary school level and beyond. Compared to the early years, language growth during older childhood and adolescence is “gradual and protracted” (Nippold, 1998, p.3). It also becomes increasingly individualistic, as students choose their GCSE subjects, take up hobbies and learn new vocabulary related to their interests. This makes it harder to say what “normal” language development looks like, and to identify when there is a problem.

    (If you’d like to read more about later language development, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/01/09/later-language-development-what-speech-and-language-therapists-need-to-know-about-the-secondary-school-years/)

    Despite a growing body of research, there are still fewer assessments for this age group than there are for younger children. Marilyn Nippold (1998), a leading expert in adolescent language development has argued extensively that many standardized language assessments designed for teenagers actually assess more basic, foundational skills, and fail to measure more advanced, age-appropriate skills.

    For example, these tests may assess basic sentence structures and core vocabulary, when these skills are typically mastered several years before. On the other hand, important aspects of adolescent language development such as figurative language, understanding and production of a range of advanced syntactic structures, as well as relevant discourse types, such as expository discourse, may not be covered.

    (For my post about expository discourse, please click: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/)

    This is likely to lead to the identification of only the most severe and obvious language disorders, whilst more subtle difficulties are missed. In other words, it is quite possible for a student with a language disorder to attain an average score on a formal language assessment.

    You are likely to come across students with a wide range of difficulties at secondary school. Some will continue to display obvious oral language difficulties. But many will have “outgrown” these, only for difficulties with more complex written language or pragmatics to come to the fore. Though subtle, such difficulties still have a considerable impact on classroom learning and social functioning. Yet, they are likely to be missed if standardised assessments are relied on exclusively.

    Done well, assessment at secondary level also requires more from us, as Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs), in terms of our linguistic knowledge. Nippold (2023) points out that many of us are less familiar with the details of later language development, or what to expect at different ages. Yet, if we are to say with confidence which students have language disorders and which do not, then we will need a robust understanding of advanced syntax, including later-developing syntactic structures, such as passives, adverbial clauses and clefts.

    Finding solutions

    There is far too much to say about assessment to fit into one (or even 3!) blog posts. For more comprehensive accounts, please see Nelson (1998), Larson and McKinley (2003) or Paul and Norbury (2012). The latter very helpfully split language development into four distinct developmental stages: emerging language, developing language, language for learning and advanced language.

    Students with language disorders may well be at stages typically associated with younger children. In my experience, many of my Year 7 and 8 students have been at the “Language for Learning” level typically associated with the older years of primary school. Some of my older ones, and those with more subtle difficulties have been at the “Advanced Language” stage. Meanwhile, a few have had “Developing Language”, normally associated with children aged 2 to 5.

    The authors provide detailed advice for assessing students at each stage across a whole range of areas, from the “literate” lexicon and figurative language, to comprehension and production of syntax, different types of discourse, pragmatics and the “metas”.

    Given this wealth of available  information, I just wanted to share a few ideas that I’ve found most useful in my everyday practice. I also try to keep in mind Larson and McKinley’s (2003, p.179) philosophy that assessment should be “descriptive/ explanatory, authentic, dynamic, student-centred, and multidimensional”.

    For Part 2 of this blog series on assessment, where I talk about student-focused assessment, dynamic assessment and curriculum-based language assessment (CBLA), please click here – https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/07/10/language-assessment-at-secondary-school-student-focused-dynamic-and-curriculum-based-assessment-part-2/ .

    Notes

    Larson, V.L. and McKinley, N.L. (2003) Communication solutions for older students. Thinking Pub. 

    Nelson, N. W. (1998) Childhood Language Disorders in Context: Infancy Through Adolescence. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

    Nippold, M.A. (1998) Later language development: The school-age and adolescent years. 2nd ed. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

    Nippold, M.A. (2023). Grammar guide for speech-language pathologists: Steps to analyzing complex syntax. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.