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Top Lang Disorders
Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 54–72
c 2011 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Copyright Identifying Intraindividual
Differences in Students’ Written
Language Abilities
Kenn Apel, PhD; Lynda Apel, BA
Students must be able to consciously use their knowledge of phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics to successfully read and write. Difficulties in the conscious
awareness of 1 or more of these 6 linguistic knowledge components may lead to reading and
writing deficits. In this article, we present a componential model of spoken and written language
that can guide literacy educators in their assessment of students’ written language skills. We then
provide some general assessment strategies that measure students’ conscious awareness of these
different linguistic components to read and write. To demonstrate the use of this model and the
assessment strategies, we present 3 student profiles that illustrate how difficulties with written language ability can be the result of different underlying linguistic awareness deficits. On the basis of
these individual deficits, we also provide initial suggestions for prescriptive intervention goals. Finally, we discuss some suggestions for ensuring that professionals from varying backgrounds share
a common knowledge base and vocabulary so that meaningful clinical and educational services
are provided to students who struggle in the area of written language. Key words: assessment,
impairment, reading, spelling, writing, written language
R
EADING AND WRITING are complex
skills. Unlike speaking and listening, students learning to read and write must actively think about language to convey or comprehend the intended meaning of a message
and have a solid understanding of the forms
used to communicate that information. The
fact that many students successfully learn to
read and write relatively effortlessly in the first
decade or so of their life is remarkable. Not all
students, however, adequately acquire these
written language skills.∗ Some students struggle learning to read and write. When this oc-
Author Affiliation: School of Communication
Science and Disorders, Florida State University,
Tallahassee.
Corresponding Author: Kenn Apel, PhD, School of
Communication Science and Disorders, Florida State
University, 600 W, College Ave, Tallahassee, FL 32306
([email protected]).
∗ Written language includes reading and writing at
the word (i.e., word decoding, word recognition, and
spelling) and text levels (i.e., reading comprehension and
written composition).
DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0b013e31820a22b4
curs, a variety of literacy educators, including
general and special education teachers, reading specialists, and speech–language pathologists, are called upon collaboratively to help
these children acquire their written language
abilities.
Unfortunately, some literacy educators do
not have a solid understanding of the basic linguistic knowledge necessary for written language development (Moats, 2009a, 2009b)
and others may be unaware of their important educational roles in improving students’
written language abilities (e.g., Fallon & Katz,
2010). Literacy educators need to appreciate their professional role in helping students
who struggle with reading and writing and
develop a common understanding of the linguistic knowledge that children must use to
acquire written language.
The purpose of this article is to provide
a conceptual model of the basic linguistic
knowledge components that undergird spoken and written language development and
use. We will argue that the understanding and
use of the components forming this model
can guide all literacy educators, regardless of
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Identifying Intraindividual Differences
their disciplinary perspectives, in their mutual attempts to identify intraindividual differences in students’ written language abilities. To accomplish this, we first discuss the
componential model that conceptually guides
our assessment of students’ written language
skills. We then review some general assessment strategies or tools that measure students’
abilities to consciously use the different linguistic awareness components to read and
write. Following this overview, we present
three student profiles that illustrate how reported difficulties with written language ability can be the result of varied underlying
linguistic awareness deficits. We also provide initial suggestions for how our assessment findings could lead to prescriptive intervention goals. Finally, we provide some suggestions for ensuring that professionals from
varying backgrounds can share a common
knowledge base and “talk the same talk” so
as to ensure consistent and meaningful clinical and educational services to students who
struggle in the area of written language.
A CONCEPTUAL COMPONENTIAL
MODEL OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN
LANGUAGE
As some literacy educators have known
for some time, spoken language comprises
phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax,
and pragmatics (e.g., American SpeechLanguage-Hearing Association [ASHA], 1983;
Bloom & Lahey, 1978). Phonology deals with
the rules governing the use of speech sounds
to convey meaning; morphology involves
rules for using meaningful units of language in
prescribed ways; semantics focuses on word
meanings; syntax represents the rules for
word, phrase, and clausal order; and pragmatics deals with rules for how communicators
produce spoken language to interact with
others and vary their language depending on
the purpose of the interaction (e.g., rules for
engaging in a shared conversation differ from
those that dictate how to convey a narrative).
The fact that these five components serve
as foundational knowledge for expressing
55
and understanding thoughts through written
language is not new (e.g., Wallach & Butler,
1994), although recent research suggests that
some literacy educators remain somewhat
hesitant and uninformed about the role of
these linguistic components for improving
written language abilities (e.g., ASHA, 2008;
Fallon & Katz, 2010).
The historic focus on the five linguistic
components that support spoken and written language is incomplete, however, without
considering orthographic knowledge as well.
On the basis of several decades of research,
experts have come to acknowledge that language also includes orthographic knowledge
(e.g., Berninger, Abbott, Nagy, & Carlisle,
2010). Orthographic knowledge is defined as
the stored information in memory for how
spoken language can be represented in written text (e.g., Apel, Masterson, & Brimo,
in press-a; Masterson & Apel, 2000). Orthographic knowledge comprises two types of
linguistic knowledge: (1) word-specific orthographic representations and (2) general orthographic patterns that guide spellings of most
words. Word-specific orthographic representations, or mental graphemic representations
(MGRs), are developed through multiple exposures to written words (e.g., Apel, 2010;
Ehri & Wilce, 1985; Share, 2004). Once a
clear, specific MGR is established for a word,
individuals can read and write the word effortlessly and fluently. Thus, MGR knowledge
aids in reading comprehension and written
composition because readers and writers do
not need to devote much cognitive attention
to thinking about how to decode or encode
(spell) specific written words and can devote
more cognitive resources to understanding or
conveying meaning in a text. Orthographic
pattern knowledge represents broader, more
general knowledge for how speech is represented in writing (Apel et al., in press-a).
Knowledge of general orthographic patterns
includes understanding of the alphabetic principle (i.e., letter(s) that can represent specific
speech sounds), allowable combinations of
letters (e.g., English orthography permits the
“cr”combination, as in crown, but not the “jr”
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Figure 1. Componential model of spoken and written language.
combination), and constraints that govern in
what word positions letters may or may not
occur (e.g., “ng”can be written in the final position but not in the word initial position).
Orthographic knowledge, along with the
traditional five linguistic knowledge components, forms the basis of the componential
model represented in Figure 1. The lower
level of the figure depicts the six linguistic components or knowledge sources that
contribute to spoken language development.
Many literacy educators would readily acknowledge the contributions of the first
five components to spoken language development, but the inclusion of orthographic
knowledge initially may seem surprising. Its
presence is supported by research that has
demonstrated that orthographic knowledge
can influence spoken language development.
For example, Rosenthal and Ehri (2008) explicitly taught second graders the names of
novel pictured objects. In half of the lessons,
an object’s written name was visible although
the researchers did not draw the children’s
attention to the written word form. The researchers found that children learned more
words (i.e., they were better able to pronounce and defined the words correctly)
when the words’ spellings had been present
during the lesson. Similarly, Apel (2010) exposed kindergarten children to novel words
presented in a spoken and written context.
He found that the children’s quick incidental learning of spoken words was affected by
the orthographic properties of the word. Spoken words with more frequently occurring orthographic patterns were learned more readily than words with less frequently occurring
orthographic patterns. Given these findings
across studies, it appears that orthographic
knowledge has a role, albeit somewhat indirect (as indicated by the dotted arrow in the
model), in developing spoken language.
Experts agree that children acquire spoken
language with little to no conscious awareness about the linguistic knowledge components that comprise language; however, children must apply some level of conscious
awareness of each of the linguistic components as they develop their written language
skills (e.g., Kamhi & Catts, 2005). As represented in Figure 1, active, conscious awareness about each component leads to the conscious use of those sources of knowledge
to read and write. Whereas the six linguistic
knowledge components are developing and
contributing to overall spoken language development early in child development (lower
level of Figure 1), children are not consciously
aware of these linguistic knowledge components as they are learning to speak or listen. However, as they engage in reading and
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writing, children must consciously use this
awareness of the six components (upper,
shaded level of Figure 1) at a somewhat explicit level to learn to read and write. For example, children must think about the individual phonemes they hear in a word (phonemic awareness) to adequately assign letters
for those sounds as they spell. As they write
or read words, they must consider allowable
letter–sound correspondences (orthographic
pattern awareness). When required to read or
write words with affixes, children must consider the effect of those affixes on the written word form as they inflect a word to create a past tense or modify a word to form
a new derivation (i.e., use of morphological
awareness). They must understand and ensure that the words written or read reflect the
intended meaning (semantic awareness). Active thought about phrase and clause structure (syntactic awareness) enables children to
understand or compose more complex sentences. Finally, explicitly considering the author’s purpose and audience for a written text
and the related structure of a given genre
(e.g., narrative, compare and contrast, persuasive) aids in comprehending or producing a well-received and understood text (pragmatic awareness). Thus, because conscious
awareness is applied to, or overlaid upon, basic linguistic knowledge (middle section of
Figure 1), children can purposefully use that
knowledge to engage successfully in written
language.
Using this componential model, literacy educators cannot only assess students’ knowledge of the six linguistic knowledge components but also conduct assessment protocols that measure the effects of students’
conscious awareness, or lack of awareness,
of these six components as they engage in
written language. When students struggle to
read and write, literacy educators can use
this model to identify patterns of errors or
strategies they are using. As with any language
assessment, literacy educators have the option of administering a norm-referenced, standardized test. Information about these tests
is readily available (e.g., Robertson, 2007;
57
Wolter, 2007). Norm-referenced tests are useful for determining how students’ skills compare with those of age- or grade-related peers;
however, they are less useful for determining
which of the six linguistic awareness components might be contributing to students’ difficulties. We begin the next section, then, by
discussing assessment strategies that can help
capture the underlying linguistic awareness
deficits that often contribute to poor reading and writing abilities. All of these assessment tasks can be used to determine whether
one or more linguistic awareness components
is weak and in need of intervention. We follow this general description of tasks by discussing three students struggling with written language development to illustrate how
the assessment tasks revealed three different profiles of strengths and weaknesses that
led to three specific, prescriptive intervention
plans.
ASSESSMENT OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE
ABILITIES
Many experts have argued that a highly informative measure of a child’s expressive spoken language abilities is a spontaneous language sample that is representative of the
child’s typical communication abilities (e.g.,
Lahey, 1988; Robertson, 2007). Such a sample allows a literacy educator to determine
how a child produces and understands language and to determine the child’s strengths
and weaknesses in each of the linguistic
knowledge components contributing to language. Similarly, spontaneous samples of a
student’s reading and writing are excellent
data sources to determine how conscious use
of each linguistic awareness component impacts the student’s reading and writing skills,
leading to the development of individual academic profiles and meaningful intervention
goals.
SPONTANEOUS READING SAMPLE
We typically ask students to read aloud
a portion of one or more texts for us. We
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conduct this assessment to capture students’
reading abilities at the word and text levels
(e.g., Apel, Masterson, & Wilson-Fowler, in
press-b; Nelson & Van Meter, 2002; Singer,
2007). For example, when we ask students
to read a text, we follow along on a separate
document, preferably a copy of that text, and
mark errors made at the word level. These errors, or miscues, can tell us about students’
phonemic, orthographic, and morphological
awareness skills. When students attempt to
read a word that appears to be unfamiliar, we
expect them to “sound out” or decode the
word. If they instead seem to look at the first
letter or so of the word and make a guess
at the word (e.g., reading the word “when”
as “want”), it suggests that they may not be
able to use, or do not know to use, phonemic
awareness skills to blend sounds representing
the letters of the words. If they read a word
incorrectly, using a sound for a letter that
does not represent that letter (e.g., reading
“tuck” as “chuck”), they likely are struggling
with an aspect of orthographic pattern awareness. Similarly, misreading an affixed word
(e.g., “laughed”) incorrectly (e.g., pronouncing the past tense as /Id/) suggests that they
are not using morphological awareness skills
adequately.
When students’ word-level reading errors
suggest difficulties using phonemic, orthographic pattern, and/or morphological awareness, we typically follow up our hypotheses
about the causes of their struggles in two
ways. First, we examine whether their writing abilities confirm difficulties with these
three linguistic awareness components (see
next section for more details on assessment
of writing). Second, we test our hypotheses
by conducting one or more informal measures that assess students’ conscious awareness of phonology, orthography, and morphology. When assessing phonemic awareness,
we administer either norm-referenced measures (e.g., Wagner, Torgeson, & Rashotte,
1999) or criterion-referenced measures requiring students to segment words into individual phonemes and blend phonemes into
words. Orthographic pattern awareness can
be assessed using tasks taken from the literature (e.g., Cassar & Treiman, 1997; Georgiou,
Parrila, & Kirby, 2009). For example, a typical orthographic pattern awareness task involves giving students a series of nonsense
word pairs (e.g., naff vs. namm; vock vs. vok)
and asking them which looks more like a real
word. By including one word that follows conventional orthography (i.e., naff or vock) and
one that does not (i.e., namm or vok), we can
determine whether students have the ability
to consciously consider allowable letter sequences in written language. Finally, literacy
educators may assess students’ use of morphological awareness in a number of ways (see examples in Apel & Thomas-Tate, 2009; Carlisle,
2000; or Green, 2004). Apel and Thomas-Tate
described a derivational suffix task in which
a literacy educator verbally presents a base
word followed by a corresponding sentence
that is missing the derived form of that word
”). The base
(e.g., “Farm. My uncle is a
word and the sentence also are presented in
writing. The student must write or verbalize the derived word that has been omitted
(i.e., farmer). As a whole, we gather insights
into students’ phonemic, orthographic pattern, and morphological awareness, three linguistic awareness components in the spoken–
written language model, through read aloud
and specific follow-up tasks.
We do not attend only to students’ wordlevel reading abilities during a spontaneous
reading; we examine their comprehension
of the text as well. When students misread
a word (e.g., potato), by substituting either
a novel word (e.g., pototo) or orthographically similar word (e.g., tomato) and yet
do not note the mistake by rereading or
correcting the error, they likely are not using their semantic awareness skills to recognize the incongruent meaning at the sentence level. In addition, following the spontaneous reading, we ask key questions to assess comprehension of the text. For example, we ask factual questions about the main
ideas, supporting details, and key vocabulary
words that are likely new to the student, and
inferential questions about information that
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can be deduced from the facts (e.g., Singer,
2007). These latter questions often focus on
whether students can relate information to
themselves or other situations outside of the
text.
Difficulties with factual or inferential questions can be the result of poor conscious
use of one or more of the linguistic awareness components in our model, including
the use of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic
awareness. Follow-up tasks to determine the
cause(s) of the difficulties are many. For students who appear to have poor semantic
knowledge and/or struggle consciously using
that knowledge (i.e., semantic awareness) to
construct meaning for novel words read, we
use a sentence cloze task discussed by Katz
and Carlisle (2009). For this task, students are
presented with a series of sentences, each
containing an omitted word. Students fill in
the missing word, sometimes after being presented with a set of four choices. This task assesses whether students can use surrounding
contextual cues to deduce the required word.
At times, when we suspect that poor syntactic awareness is leading to difficulties answering comprehension questions, we administer one or two informal measures of syntactic awareness (Brimo & Apel, 2010). One task
requires students to reorder a set of words
(e.g., letter Mrs. Wagner lunch a after wrote)
to create a grammatically correct sentence.
A second requires students to judge whether
a sentence is grammatically correct (e.g., Jill
bought a town house the T.V. reporter) and,
if not, to correct it (e.g., Jill, the T.V. reporter,
bought a town house). Results of these tasks
allow us to determine the level of students’
awareness of grammatically acceptable word,
phrase, and clause order and the need for
complete thoughts at the sentence level. Finally, if we believe that inadequate pragmatic
awareness (i.e., difficulty in the conscious use
of knowledge of the structure of different
writing genres, such as narrative or expository styles) is leading to poor responses to
questions, we ask students to read several passages that differ in genre type and then determine whether comprehension of text is con-
59
sistently lower with one type of genre than
others.
Using the reading sample and selected
follow-up tasks from those mentioned earlier,
literacy educators can determine whether difficulty in the conscious use of a linguistic
awareness component(s) may be contributing to poor reading abilities. Active, conscious
use of linguistic awareness skills cannot occur
unless the knowledge has been adequately
learned at the more basic level. Thus, literacy educators can use their knowledge of spoken language assessment tools to determine
whether difficulty in applying a specific linguistic awareness component (e.g., syntactic
awareness) for reading and writing may be the
result of poor knowledge in that area (i.e.,
poor syntactic knowledge). Poor knowledge
in a specific area (e.g., syntax) will need to
be addressed prior to, or in conjunction with,
intervention for improving conscious use of
that linguistic awareness component for written language.
Using the componential model of spoken
and written language as a guide, literacy educators can gather numerous insights into the
possible causes of poor word- and text-level
reading skills. Rather than only acknowledging that a particular student struggles with
reading words or comprehending text, the
literacy educator can identify key linguistic knowledge and awareness components
in need of strengthening. As mentioned earlier, an analysis of students’ writing also can
be used to provide, or confirm, information
about students’ struggles in actively using
one or more of the linguistic knowledge and
awareness components.
SPONTANEOUS WRITING SAMPLE
We typically ask students to write one or
more compositions for us; the results then
can be analyzed to determine whether inadequate conscious use of one or more of the
linguistic awareness components is interfering with communicating through writing. For
younger students (i.e., before third grade), we
typically provide one or more narrative
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prompts (e.g., tell me an adventure story
about some children going to outer space)
to obtain samples of writing ability. For older
students, we typically provide prompts that
target more than one writing genre, such as
supplying a descriptive (e.g., tell me why you
like Halloween) or a compare and contrast
prompt (e.g., describe the similarities and differences between social studies and science
and why you like one over the other) in addition to a narrative prompt.
Analyzing writing samples allows literacy
educators to determine whether students are
struggling with the active use of one or more
of the linguistic awareness components (see
also Nelson & Van Meter, 2007). For example,
when students do not demonstrate knowledge of structural differences through their
writing (e.g., using a narrative structure when
asked to write an expository composition), literacy educators may deduce that those students either lack knowledge of certain discourse structures or experience difficulty in
consciously using awareness of that knowledge when writing (i.e., pragmatic awareness). Similarly, writing samples that represent a spoken language style (i.e., writing as
one talks) versus a more literate style of language (i.e., writing that mirrors the language
found in most fiction or nonfiction books)
may indicate inadequate knowledge of more
literate language or poor conscious awareness of that knowledge. For example, students
may not be conscious of the need to choose
more sophisticated vocabulary (i.e., semantic
awareness) and sentence structures (i.e., syntactic awareness). Literacy educators can use
follow-up activities to confirm their hypotheses. First, literacy educators can engage students in spoken narratives and other expository genres to determine whether they have
the knowledge of these particular genres. Second, literacy educators can have students read
different genres or read the texts to the students and ask them to identify differences
in the structure among texts. This latter task
taps into explicit use of pragmatic awareness
for specific written discourse features. Third,
literacy educators can ask students to brain-
storm synonyms for common words to determine their ability to consciously consider and
produce more sophisticated or less common
terms for concepts (i.e., semantic awareness).
Finally, as mentioned earlier, literacy educators can administer a syntactic awareness task
to examine students’ ability to identify and use
different syntactic constructions.
Students also may misspell words in their
written compositions. Analyses of these misspellings provide an indication of students’
conscious use of their phonemic, orthographic pattern, and morphological awareness skills (e.g., Apel et al., in press-b; Masterson & Apel, 2000). Students likely are
struggling with phonemic awareness when
they omit letters representing sounds within
words (e.g., “sop”for stop). Orthographic pattern awareness is deficient when students
use an unconventional or illegal letter or
letter sequence for sounds that are present
in a word (e.g., “bas” for bash, “chree” for
tree). Evidence of poor morphological awareness is apparent when students leave off or
misspell affixes (e.g., “kick” for kicking or
“friendlee” for friendly), do not modify, or
modify incorrectly, a base word when an affix is added (e.g., “shoping” for shopping, “likeed” for liked), or fail to use knowledge of
a base word to spell a more complex, derived word (e.g., spelling please correctly but
pleasure as “pleser”). It is important to note,
however, that writing compositions can be
limited in providing enough data to determine whether students struggle with their
phonemic, orthographic pattern, and/or morphological awareness. This is because students may avoid writing words for which they
lack word-specific spelling knowledge (i.e.,
MGRs). Because of this constraint, we also require students to spell a list of words we dictate to them. By doing this, we can ensure
that there are multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills, or lack of
skills, with these three linguistic awareness
components—phonemic, orthographic pattern, and morphological. Follow-up activities
to confirm the findings from the spelling analyses for conscious awareness of these three
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components are the same as those used to
confirm word-level reading difficulties mentioned earlier.
By collecting and analyzing spontaneous
reading and writing samples, literacy educators can develop an understanding of students’ strengths and weaknesses in using the
six language awareness components to read
and write. Using the componential language
model as a guide for assessment, literacy
educators can go beyond simply identifying
that students struggle with written language,
as determined by norm-referenced measures,
and explain why students struggle. This latter point is crucial. Not only do the assessment tasks described earlier help literacy educators determine specific intervention goals
for students, they also help differentiate the
needs of students who, at first glance, appear
to have the same or similar written language
difficulties. In the following section, we describe three students, all of whom by teacher
and parental report were struggling with written language. Yet, after the use of the aforementioned assessment tasks, each presented
with a notably different profile of strengths
and weaknesses.
ASSESSMENT IN ACTION: STUDENT
PROFILES
The three students discussed later represent the type of school-aged students literacy educators may encounter daily. The profiles are based on students we have evaluated
and for whom we have provided intervention.
The students in these profiles share several
characteristics in common. They all attended
the same private school. At the time of the
evaluations described later, they were receiving services for academic difficulties (i.e., not
meeting state-established reading and writing
benchmarks). Specifically, they received pullout services provided by an “academic tutor.”
They all received the same instruction from
the tutor; most activities were focused on “following oral directions” to complete school
tasks, learning to read “sight words,”and completing worksheets that required them to read
61
short passages and answer questions. These
worksheets were not accompanied by instruction on strategies for how to read and answer
questions. All three had been retained a grade
one or more times in their academic career
because they did not meet grade-level academic expectations imposed by the school.
They also scored below the first standard deviation on a norm-referenced measure of reading (e.g., Woodcock Reading Mastery Test–
Revised; Woodcock, 1998) and/or writing
(e.g., Test of Written Spelling-4; Larsen, Hammill, & Moats, 1999).
In each profile, we provide highlights of
findings from spontaneous reading and writing samples and specific follow-up activities.
Our analyses of the reading and writing samples were guided by the componential model
of spoken and written language and lead
to specific intervention goals. As a group,
these student profiles highlight the variation
in strengths and weaknesses that are found
when using the componential model of spoken and written language.
Profile 1: Andrew∗
Andrew was 10.5 years old at the time of
the assessment. He was in his second year
of third grade. He also had repeated kindergarten. His teachers and parents had no concerns about his spoken language skills. An
informal spoken language sample suggested
adequate phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic knowledge
needed for conversation.
Reading sample
Andrew read from two fictional books he
brought from home, including one that he
had judged to be easy to read and one that
he thought was challenging. Both books were
below third grade as rated by the publisher
or via the use of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade
Level readability score in Microsoft Word. Andrew’s word-level reading accuracy on the
∗ Names are pseudonyms representing composites of real
children.
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Table 1. Samples from Andrew’s reading and writing assessments
Excerpt from Andrew’s
reading assessmenta
Joey Jimmy put on his mask
man.
He flapped flipped his cape
cage in front for of the
mirror m-m-m-(mumble).
This The is the best blue
costume (mumble), he
thought told.
I’m sure such to win the
contest (mumble).
Joey Jimmy skipped
downstairs.
Excerpt from Andrew’s
writing compositionb
Analysis
Reading errors (e.g.,
Ose (Once) thre (there) was a gil
mumbling, guessing based
(girl) wha (who) was a tak (track)
on first few letters)
sar (star) who was non (known)
appeared to be due to poor
for beng (being) rely (really) fat
use of phonemic blending to
(fast). She tand (trained) relly
sound out words.
(really) hrad (hard) becus
(because) she pand (planned) on Spelling errors appeared to be
due mostly to poor
ting (trying) out for the Olympics.
phonemic (e.g., tak/track),
Howvr (However), rit (right) befr
orthographic pattern (e.g.,
(before) the ti ot (tryouts), she
rit/right) and morphological
bok (broke) her lag (leg) and
(e.g., pand/planned)
cod’t (couldn’t) rin(run).
awareness.
a Reading
sample shows miscues with original text shown with strikethrough font and Andrew’s spoken miscue underlined.
b Writing sample shows intended words in parentheses.
easy and challenging books was 73% and
70%, respectively. Typically, reading comprehension is considered to be compromised
when accuracy is below 90% (Chall, 1996).
We examined the errors, or miscues, Andrew
made while he read aloud (see Table 1 for
an excerpt) as well as his responses to our
questions following his reading. Most of his
word-level reading errors involved deletions
of words or parts of words (reading downstairs as “down”) and guesses based on initial
word cues (the for “this”).He rarely attempted
to sound out, or decode, words; when he did,
he typically sounded out the first portion of
a word and then “mumbled” through the remaining portion. These results suggested that
Andrew was not using his phonemic awareness abilities to sound or blend across words.
In our follow-up assessment, we first administered an informal measure of letter–sound
knowledge to ensure that he knew the sounds
related to letters and digraphs (e.g., “sh,”“th”).
Andrew successfully completed this task. We
then presented him with a set of nonwords,
administered individually, and asked him to
read, or sound out, the words. Except for sim-
ple consonant–vowel and consonant–vowel–
consonant word structures, Andrew struggled
to blend sounds across words. These findings
pointed to a difficulty with phonemic awareness.
Andrew appeared to experience difficulty
answering many of the factual and inferential questions asked after completing a reading
because of his struggles reading at the word
level. To confirm this supposition, we read
other passages from the two texts to him and
asked him factual and inferential questions; he
responded appropriately to these questions.
In addition, when engaged in conversation
(spoken language), he produced and comprehended a variety of words that varied in
semantic complexity (semantic knowledge)
in both simple and complex syntactic constructions (syntactic knowledge). His use of
language (pragmatic knowledge) was appropriate for different types of intents (e.g., comments, requests) and discourse styles (conversation vs. narrative). Thus, it appeared that
reading difficulties at the time of the evaluation primarily resulted from difficulty with
phonemic awareness.
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Writing sample
Prior to the evaluation, we asked Andrew
to write two narratives (see Table 1 for
an excerpt). Both written compositions contained age-appropriate structure (i.e., story
grammar) for a narrative sample. Specifically,
both written narratives contained at least two
episodes or plots (Lahey, 1988). The written narratives contained attempts at words
that were less common and more literate in
style (using provide vs. give). In addition, two
thirds of the sentence structures were complex (i.e., contained more than one clause)
consistent with previous reports of the syntactic complexity of third-grade children’s writing samples (e.g., Puranik, Lombardino, & Altmann, 2008). These results suggested at least
adequate pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic
awareness abilities, respectively.
Andrew’s writing samples contained numerous misspellings. For many of the misspelled words, we had to ask Andrew to identify the word. To gather more information on
his spelling abilities, we administered an additional list of words taken from the SPELL2: Spelling Performance Evaluation for Language and Literacy (Masterson, Apel, & Wasowicz, 2006). Most of Andrew’s errors were
consistent with the findings from the reading sample; he demonstrated poor phonemic
awareness. Specifically, he frequently omitted
letters for sounds in words he attempted to
spell, often within consonant clusters (e.g.,
spelling fast as “fat” and broke as “bok”). He
also demonstrated poor use of orthographic
pattern (e.g., right written as “rit”) and morphological awareness (e.g., spelling the regular past tense incorrectly using “d”rather than
“ed”).
Summary and intervention
recommendations
On the basis of the assessment findings, Andrew demonstrated a notable weakness in using his phonemic awareness skills to read and
write words. This difficulty interfered with
his comprehension of text and readers’ understanding of texts he wrote. He also ap-
63
peared to have some difficulties with other
types of linguistic awareness, including orthographic pattern and morphological awareness. Given these findings, an immediate goal
could be to increase his phonemic awareness for both reading and spelling by engaging in two specific activities. Both activities
would be introduced through modeling. First,
he would be shown how to blend sounds
across words or use “continuous voicing”(see
Apel et al., in press-b). The continuous voicing strategy involves blending sounds across
a written word versus producing each sound
separately. Second, he would be shown how
to segment words into their individual sounds
by using a Sound String, a bead with seven to
eight colored beads (see Apel et al., in pressa). Once he correctly segmented the word,
he then would be shown and encouraged to
write at least one letter per sound to spell the
word. This would result in at least a phonetically accurate spelling; future lessons likely
would require instruction about specific orthographic patterns. An increase in Andrew’s
phonemic awareness ability should lead to improved word-level reading and spelling. Further assessment could be conducted at that
time to determine whether he continued to
demonstrate deficits in orthographic pattern
and morphological awareness as well as any
other linguistic awareness areas that were not
apparent during the initial assessment.
Profile 2: Brian
Brian was 10 years old at the time of
the assessment and in the third grade. He
had been retained in kindergarten. Similar to
Andrew, there were no expressed concerns
about Brian’s spoken language skills and no
difficulties noted during conversation.
Reading sample
Brian read two fictional texts he brought
from his classroom library: one easy and one
challenging. The former was at grade level
and the latter above grade level. He was 95%
and 93% accurate at the word level on the
easy and challenging texts, respectively. On
the easy text, the miscues were rare and no
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Table 2. Samples from Brian’s writing assessments
Brian’s narrative
compositiona
Brian’s responses to dictation
Analysis
Narrative: Contains an episode:
Target Item: Mr. Straw lost his
Last sumr, at St. Goerge
Initiating event—wanted to find
way when he was out driving
Iland, I wantd to find
something; Attempt—used metal
around looking for his
something so I was
detector; Consequence—found a
neighbor’s goat and ended up
sertching with my medl
ring. Spelling errors appeared to
traveling in circles.
detektr to find
be due mostly to poor conscious
Response: Mr. Straw lost his way
something. I fownd a
use of ortho-graphic awareness
when he was owt driving
ringing (ring). It was
(e.g., sumr/ summer, medl/medal)
around looking for his
dep in the sand and I
and morphological know-ledge
neighbors goat and indeed
was eksitid (excited). It
(e.g., eksitid/excited) and mental
travleing in corcles.
had a penk stone on it
graphemic representations (e.g.,
and it was prety. I was
Goerge/George, fownd/found).
happy untell I lost it.
Dictation: Spelling errors appeared
to be due mostly to poor mental
graphemic representation
knowledge (e.g., owt/out,
corcles/circles).
a Writing
sample shows intended words in parentheses.
identifiable pattern emerged. When reading
the challenging text, he used phonemic blending accurately to decode unfamiliar words; he
also used context to confirm unfamiliar words
that he decoded. His responses to reading
comprehension questions (factual and inferential) were judged to be appropriate. Taken
as a whole, Brian demonstrated reading skills
that were appropriate for his grade placement.
Writing sample
Brian shared two compositions he had
handwritten for school, neither of which had
been corrected by his parents or his teacher.
One of the compositions was a narrative
(see Table 2) and the other a critique of
a movie. The overall structure of the two
compositions was appropriate for the genres,
suggesting appropriate pragmatic awareness.
Both written story samples contained at least
one episode; however, the samples were
shorter than would be expected for a 10year-old student. As shown in Table 2, Brian’s
narrative contained some literate style vocabulary (e.g., searching, excited) and complex
syntactic structures (e.g., the first sentence is
multiclausal with embedded phrases). Similar
evidence of the use of semantic and syntactic
awareness skills was evident in his expository
composition. Given these two samples,
semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness
appeared to be strengths. In both samples,
however, spelling errors were frequent. The
errors represented difficulties with orthographic pattern (e.g., not doubling the “m” in
summer, lacking a vowel for the syllabic “l”in
medal, using one vowel to represent the long
“e” in deep) and morphological awareness
(e.g., not spelling the past tense correctly
for excited), and poor MGRs (e.g., spelling
found as “fownd”). For the orthographic
pattern awareness errors, it appeared that
Brian relied on his awareness of basic letter–
sound knowledge versus more sophisticated
awareness of orthographic patterns (e.g., /m/
is represented by the doubled “m” in words
with a consonant–short-vowel–consonant
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65
syllable). We asked Brian to read his compositions and identify errors that might have
occurred. He identified the majority of the
spelling errors. When asked why he had
misspelled them, he responded that he was
thinking about what he wanted to write, not
how to spell the words. We acknowledged
that thinking about the message was important, but suggested that he should go back
during editing and correct his misspellings so
his message would be clear.
To obtain more information about his
phonemic, orthographic pattern, and morphological awareness for spelling, we administered two additional follow-up tasks. First,
given his comment about focusing on the
meaning he wished to convey in his writing versus word forms, we assessed Brian’s
spelling ability when writing only one sentence at a time to control for the pragmatic demands inherent in larger writing samples. As
shown in Table 2, his spelling in this task was
more accurate than in his composition (19%
errors vs. 30% errors). Most of his errors on
the dictated sentence activity were likely due
to poor MGR knowledge (e.g., use of “or” vs.
“ir” in circles). We also asked Brian to spell a
series of individual words taken from SPELL.
On this task, he continued to show difficulties
with orthographic pattern (e.g., not doubling
consonants appropriately within words, omitting vowels for syllabic “l” and “r”) and morphological awareness (e.g., writing suffixes
the way they sound vs. the way they are written), and MGRs (using incorrect vowel letters for unstressed vowels, such as ubove for
above).
most solely on conveying the meaning of his
message and little on the form of that message. Immediate intervention goals would be
to further develop his orthographic and morphological awareness and improve his understanding for the importance of correct form
when conveying information through written language. Word sort activities could be
used to improve orthographic and morphological awareness (e.g., Apel et al., in pressb). Within a word sort activity, he would be
given a set of word cards and be asked to sort
the cards into piles based on shared orthographic or morphological patterns. By sorting the cards and then discovering the pattern, the likelihood that he would be able
to use that knowledge later improves (Zutell,
1998). To increase his attention to the form
of written language (spelling) in addition to
the meaning, he would be introduced to the
notion of process writing that includes the
crucial step of proofing or editing one’s work
as part of constructing a well-formed written
composition (e.g., Nelson, Bahr, & Van Meter,
2004; Singer & Bashir, 2004).
Summary and intervention
recommendations
Reading sample
Collectively, the assessment data suggested
strengths in Brian’s phonemic, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness skills. His
weaknesses appeared to be primarily in the
area of orthographic pattern and morphological awareness and MGRs. In addition, he
did not demonstrate an understanding that it
was important to produce accurate spellings.
That is, when composing text, he focused al-
Profile 3: Charlene
Charlene was 12 years old at the time of
the assessment and at the end of fourth grade.
She had been retained in third grade. Unlike
those of the prior two students, her parents
and teachers indicated some concern about
her spoken language skills as well as reading
and writing. Specifically, they characterized
her spoken language as immature and containing “simple words and sentences.”
Charlene read aloud from easy and challenging texts she brought to the assessment.
Unlike the books that Andrew and Brian
brought from home, these two texts were
books used in Charlene’s classroom. The easy
text (third-grade reading level) was a tutorial on hurricanes, a topic with which she
had background knowledge. She was 93% accurate at the word level on this text. Miscues were primarily omissions of suffixes at
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ends of words (e.g., reading hurricanes as
“hurricane”). The challenging text, a fifthgrade-level passage, was about the cause of
hiccups and, in particular, the diaphragm.
Charlene was 90% accurate. Errors were similar to those made on the easy text, although
she also omitted or substituted words for
words in the text that appeared to be on
an unfamiliar topic. She made no attempt to
sound out or decode these words. Following
her reading, we asked her to go back and
read individual sentences containing words
skipped or substituted and to “sound out”any
words with which she was unfamiliar. She was
able to correctly blend across all unknown
words to decode them. However, she did not
demonstrate an understanding of the words
and was not able to use the context of the
sentence to determine the words’ meanings.
Findings from the word-level reading analysis suggested that phonemic, orthographic
pattern, and morphological awareness abilities were likely adequate; however, knowing
when to actively use those linguistic awareness components was insufficient. Furthermore, deducing the meaning of unfamiliar
words by using contextual cues (applying semantic awareness) was a weakness.
Additional weakness in linguistic awareness
skills was apparent when we asked her to answer questions about the texts she read. For
example, we asked syntactically simple factual and inferential questions about the hurricane passage (e.g., “When did the hurricane
hit the city?”; “Why don’t people like hurricanes?”). Charlene responded appropriately
to these types of questions. On the challenging text, the less familiar topic about the human diaphragm, she was unable to answer
similar simple factual and inferential questions. For both texts, she did not correctly
answer any syntactically complex questions
(e.g., “Above what part of the body is the diaphragm located?”). However, for questions
such as these, when the wording was altered
(e.g., “The diaphragm is located above what
body part?”), she was able to answer correctly. When asked why the original question
was difficult, she was unsure. When asked
whether the words in the question were difficult or the order of the words was challenging, she affirmed the latter.
Charlene’s response that word order (i.e.,
parsing of phrases or clauses) led to difficulties comprehending the meaning of questions
suggested difficulty with syntactic awareness.
In addition, it seemed that comprehension
was better when the topic of the text focused on prior knowledge. These hypotheses led to several follow-up assessment activities. First, to further examine her conscious
awareness of syntax, we administered a measure of syntactic awareness (Brimo & Apel,
2010). We gave Charlene a series of syntactically correct and incorrect sentences that
were presented in written form but read aloud
to her and asked her to judge whether they
were correct and, if incorrect, to revise them.
She was told that revisions could include rearranging words or adding information (some
items were sentence fragments). Table 3 provides examples of the target items and her responses. The majority of her responses were
incorrect. Nongrammatical sentences were
judged to be correct or modified in an incorrect manner. These results suggested that she
was not using her syntactic awareness ability
to understand complex sentence structures.
Because of the difficulties using syntactic
awareness for writing and reading, we also
obtained a spoken language sample to determine whether the problems were caused
by poor syntactic knowledge skills. For the
language sample, we were examining Charlene’s productive syntax versus her conscious
awareness of syntax. An excerpt from the spoken language sample is contained in Table 3.
The syntactic constructions produced in the
spoken language sample mirrored the type
of structures used in her writing sample; the
majority of her utterances were simple syntactic constructions. These results suggested
that poor syntactic awareness ability was at
least partially due to poor basic knowledge of
syntax.
Given that Charlene’s responses were
poorer when reading a text on an unfamiliar topic, we also conducted two follow-up
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Table 3. Samples from Charlene’s syntactic awareness and spoken language assessments
Excerpt from Charlene’s
syntactic awareness task
Excerpt from Charlene’s
spoken language sample
Analysis
Examiner: Tell me about a favorite Syntactic awareness:
Target item: A man had
Majority of responses
T.V. show
been responsible for the
suggest Charlene was not
death of tens of thousands Charlene: It’s about a girl. She
using syntactic awareness to
works in this a place called Mad
seemingly mild looking.
develop syntactically correct
Style. She works there. They
Response: Incorrect: A man
sentences.
design clothes. And she models
had been responsible for
them there. And she has girls that Spoken language sample:
looking at the ten
Majority of utterances are
design clothes. And they show
thousand seemingly mild.
one clause utterances.
like True Jackson’s store front. . .
Target item: Lamps that
Minimal use of conjoiners
Amanda. And she designs clothes,
burned oil.
other than and.
too. She kinda helps True Jackson
Response: Incorrect: The
but not really. She puts them on
oil was burning the lamps.
someone. And then they show
Target item: He supervised
them.
an interest in music the
work of millions of
singers.
Response: Correct.
activities to investigate her comprehension of
written language when less prior knowledge
was available. First, we previewed a passage
about human brains, a relatively unfamiliar
topic, by asking her what brains do. Her response was, “You think with it and they solve
puzzles.” This preview was meant to help
Charlene activate any prior knowledge she
had about human brains. We further introduced the passage by telling her that it would
be about the cerebrum and its responsibilities.
Following the reading, we asked several specific questions. Table 4 shows one exchange
regarding a question asked. As can be read,
Charlene was unable to answer correctly the
original question or any of the follow-up questions. It appeared that she chose to answer
questions by relying on words or topics with
which she was familiar rather than attending
to syntactic cues to help focus on the purpose
of the question.
To further assess the impact of her prior
knowledge on comprehension, we read Charlene individual sentences that were about
familiar experiences yet contained unfamiliar vocabulary. For example, we read her
the following sentence and asked her to define perturbed: “The girl was perturbed that
the phone kept ringing when she was trying to sleep.” Charlene expressed that perturbed meant “loud.”It appeared she relied on
known information in the sentence (phone)
to answer the question, rather than attempting to use the syntactic and semantic context to understand new information. We followed Charlene’s response by stating that
“perturbed” was an emotion and asked how
she would feel if the phone was ringing while
she slept. She responded, “Angry!”Thus, with
scaffolding, she was able to deduce the meaning of the word. Similar to her responses on
the text about the brain, however, it appeared
that Charlene relied on words within the sentence with which she had more knowledge
rather than relying on sentence structure to
detect semantic roles (i.e., perturbed is used
to describe what the girl was feeling).
Writing sample
A picture of Charlene’s strengths and weaknesses was forming; however, we assessed
her writing skills before making conclusions.
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Table 4. Samples from Charlene’s reading comprehension and writing composition assessments
Charlene’s responses to
reading comprehension
questions
Examiner: How is the
human brain different
from an animal brain?
Charlene: Animals have
four feet.
Examiner: True, but we’re
talking about brains, not
feet. Can you think of a
way that an animal brain
thinks, how human brains
think, and how they think
differently?
Charlene: People have hair
and animals have fur.
Examiner: True, but again,
we aren’t talking about
their bodies, we’re talking
about the way their brains
work. Let’s think: How
does an animal brain work
or think and how is that
different from the way
human brains think?
Charlene: People can go
shopping and animals
can’t.
Examiner: Have you ever
known an animal who can
create a statue, write a
story, or invent music?
Charlene: No
Examiner: Can people do
that?
Charlene: Yes
Examiner: Creating is one
thing the human brain can
do that the animal brain
can’t. Do you know what
different means?
Charlene: Same
Charlene’s writing composition
Analysis
Reading comprehension:
Yay! I am going to write about
Answers appear to be based
candy. That’s why I said yay. This
on knowledge of specific
is what kinen (kind) of candy I
words rather than syntactic
am going to write about: reese
cues present in question.
(Reese’s), chockcalate, and lemon
Writing composition
sours.
sample: Meets expectations
I love reese. If you do not know
for a descriptive essay (lists
what reeses are I will tell what it
points and expands) but
means it means they have pb. I
contains mostly simple, one
love pb. The reeses have
clause sentences.
chockcalate too. There are so
Composition is written in a
good. It is sweet.
spoken language style (as if
My second favorite thing is
talking) versus a more
chockcalate. Any kine of
literacy style (the language
chockcalate Hershey. Just any
read in books).
cine. Girls love chockcate. I (it) is
sweet.
My last favorite thing is lemons
sours. They are yellow. They are
sour. They are so good. They are
sour because its call lemon sours.
The end!
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Similar to the other two students discussed,
we analyzed several writing samples. Table
4 contains one of these samples. Charlene’s
composition contained mostly simple syntactic constructions (11 of the 20 sentences contained only one clause), which was characteristic of a spoken style of language more than
a literate style. Because familiarity appeared
to influence Charlene’s performance during
the reading sample, we examined this variable
within our writing sample testing through
a follow-up activity. First, we presented her
with a list of words (in this case, words containing the /j/ sound that were part of a
spelling lesson she was receiving) and asked
her to write sentences using those words.
When a word was semantically familiar to her
(e.g., jelly), she wrote a semantically and syntactically correct sentence. However, when
words were less familiar (e.g., knowledge, energy), her accuracy suffered (e.g., “My knowledge just got a job”; “My energy was done
to do a jigsaw puzzle”). Follow-up queries
to this task such as “What does this knowledge sentence mean?” yielded responses that
suggested some level of semantic knowledge
(e.g., “It means she has knowledge so she got
a job”);however, her apparent weakness in basic syntactic knowledge did not allow her to
use the term in a meaningful manner within a
grammatically correct sentence.
Summary and intervention
recommendations
Charlene demonstrated relative strengths
in her phonemic, orthographic, morphological, and pragmatic awareness abilities. She
was identified as having weaknesses in syntactic awareness, stemming from apparent
deficits in basic knowledge of syntax. The
findings about her semantic awareness skills
were somewhat equivocal; it seemed that
poor word choice or understanding was related to poor use of syntactic awareness skills.
One immediate intervention goal would be to
increase her syntactic knowledge, and conscious awareness of that knowledge, for spoken and written language. To accomplish this
goal, we would engage Charlene in a num-
69
ber of different activities. For example, we
would provide explicit instruction for how
words, phrases, and clauses can be ordered
within sentences to convey meaning. Short
role-plays would accompany verbal and written examples of complex syntactic structures
to heighten her awareness of phrase and
clause structure and the effect of word order on meaning. We also would teach the
use of reordering strategies (i.e., moving leftembedded clauses to the right, representing
a more common clause placement in spoken
language) to aid reading comprehension. Finally, as suggested by Katz and Carlisle (2009),
we would help her recognize contextual cues
within a sentence (antonyms, synonyms, and
definitions of key content words) to help her
determine words’ meanings. This latter strategy would facilitate syntactic and semantic
awareness.
SHARING THE SAME LANGUAGE AND
KNOWLEDGE BASE
Multiple literacy educators provide services
to students with written language difficulties, including general and special education teachers, reading specialists, and speech–
language pathologists. Ideally, these professionals should work collaboratively to meet
the needs of their students (e.g., Silliman &
Wilkinson, 2004; Wallach & Ehren, 2004).
To do so, it is crucial that all literacy educators understand the linguistic knowledge
components that support reading and writing. Speech–language pathologists generally
have a good background and working knowledge of the linguistic knowledge components
contained in the spoken and written language
model depicted in Figure 1. Other educators
may be less familiar with these components
(Moats, 2009a, 2009b). In addition, many literacy educators, including speech–language
pathologists, are uncertain or not cognizant of
how the conscious use of these different linguistic components impacts written language
(ASHA, 2008; Fallon & Katz, 2010). Across disciplines, there appears to be a specific and
almost unitary focus on isolated skills (e.g.,
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vocabulary development) without attention
to other equally important abilities (e.g.,
knowing how meaning affects the way words
are written and how this knowledge can be
used to learn new words). Finally, even when
literacy educators have some understanding
of linguistic components that influence written language development, the terms used
to describe those concepts may differ among
those professionals, leading to confusion and
disconnections in intervention targets.
There are a number of actions literacy educators can take to ensure consistency in
knowledge and terms among colleagues who
serve students with written language difficulties. First, literacy educators must understand
and accept their role in developing the students’ written language skills. The hope is that
journal issues such as the current one will
encourage all literacy educators to become
more involved in and knowledgeable about
written language assessment and intervention. Second, and perhaps most obviously, as
literacy educators become more knowledgeable about the linguistic components that
contribute to written language development,
they should share that knowledge with their
colleagues. Knowledgeable literacy educators
can provide brief informational packets or inservice programs to educate their colleagues
on the linguistic components that support
both spoken and written language. Finally, Literacy educators can help to develop a shared
vocabulary among themselves to talk about
the knowledge and skills targeted when working on written language skills. These terms
could be those used in Figure 1 (e.g., orthographic pattern knowledge) or more general
expressions used by lay people to talk about
the same or related concepts (e.g., spelling
rules). Regardless of the strategy chosen, it
is important that all professionals share not
only the same terms but also a shared, complete understanding of the meaning of those
terms.
SUMMARY
Reading and writing are not single constructs or skills. Their development depends
on the conscious awareness of a variety of
linguistic knowledge components applied in
an integrated manner. Literacy educators who
have an understanding for these linguistic
components can rely on this information to
assess how children consciously use that linguistic awareness when they read and write.
These assessments help literacy educators determine prescriptive intervention goals for
improving students’ written language abilities. When all literacy educators share an understanding of these linguistic components
and a common language to talk about them,
then students with written language difficulties will benefit.
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