Abstract
Lombardino, L. J., Lieberman, R. J., & Brown, J. C. (2005). Assessment of literacy and language. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
The assessments and interventions that school speech-language pathologists (SLPs) do should link with the curriculum. For kindergarten and first-grade children, a primary focus is on emergent literacy skills. Literacy skills require two components of language: (a) phonological awareness and phonics/orthographic skills necessary for decoding and (b) semantic, syntactic, and discourse skills necessary for comprehension. Most assessment tools focus on one or the other, but not both of these language components. Failing to address both of these components can result in children struggling in the classroom and not receiving the necessary support services. (See the article, “Language of At-Risk First Graders” in this issue of Word of Mouth.) The Assessment of Literacy and Language (ALL) enables SLPs to use one test to evaluate the phonological awareness/orthographic skills and semantic/syntactic language essential for literacy.
The ALL was developed to measure the language development and early literacy skills of children in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. It is used to identify children with language disorders and those at risk for later literacy problems as a result of environmental, hereditary, and phonological risk factors. The ALL assesses the following components:
Language
□ Basic Concepts (the child points to a described concept) □ Receptive Vocabulary (the child points to a labeled picture) □ Parallel Sentence Production (cloze sentence procedures) □ Word Relationships (the child explains/describes how two words are related)
Phonological Awareness
□ Rhyme Knowledge (rhyme identification and production) □ Sound Categorization (sound discrimination) □ Elision (compound word tasks)
Alphabetic Knowledge
□ Letter Knowledge (letter identification, labeling, and writing) □ Phonics Knowledge (letter-sound correspondence) □ Invented Spelling (dictated spelling)
Print Awareness
□ Book Handling (identification of book sections and conventions) □ Concept of Word (word identification) □ Matching Symbols (visual matching of targeted symbols)
Fluency
□ Sight Word Recognition □ Rapid Automatic Naming □ Word Retrieval
Comprehension
□ Listening Comprehension (story retell and questioning)
There is also a Caregiver Questionnaire that asks caregivers about their child’s attentional behaviors and interests and skills in each of these areas.
Each subtest of the ALL has three components. The first component, the initial indicator, identifies children at risk for language or literacy impairments. The second, diagnostic subtests, are administered based on the areas of concern indicated by the initial indicator. Last, the criterion-referenced subtests are administered based on clinical judgment to obtain further information on the child’s language and reading impairment. All subtests of the ALL can be administered in approximately 1 hr. On completion, index scores, composite scores, confidence intervals, percentile ranks, and criterion referenced subtest scores are available.
The ALL was standardized based on stratified data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census (Current Population Survey, October 2002) regarding demographic variables such as grade, sex, race/ethnicity, geographic region, and parent education. A total of 600 children were included in the standardization procedures; each child took the test as per the administration guidelines without modifications and none of the children had a diagnosis of a moderate or severe behavioral or emotional disorder. The ALL displays test–retest reliability, internal consistency, and interrater reliability. It has very good to excellent sensitivity and specificity, meaning that it appropriately identifies those students who have impairments (sensitivity) and those who do not (specificity). It had a moderate-positive correlation with the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–2 (CELF Preschool-2; Wiig, Secord, & Semel, 2004) and the Pre-Reading Inventory and Phonological Awareness (PIPA: Dodd, Crosbie, McIntosch, Teitzel, & Ozanne, 2003). Across subtests, the ALL also had a slightly-low to moderately-high correlation with the Early Reading Diagnostic Assessment, Second Edition (ERDA; Harcourt Assessment, Inc, 2003).