How Do New Zealand Teachers Assess Children’s Oral Language and Literacy Skills at School Entry?

Abstract

Teachers of year 0/1 students in English-medium schools in New Zealand (1896 schools) were invited to participate in a survey focussed on assessment of new entrant children’s oral language and emergent literacy skills, with an estimated 21% response rate (N = 745). Teachers indicated using a variety of methods for assessing children’s skills at school entry, from standardised measures to informal teacher judgements. In response to open-ended questions several dominant themes were identified: (a) concerns regarding the skill development of many new entrants; (b) a desire for tools to assess oral language and phonological awareness; (c) preferences for tools that were current, efficient, user-friendly and appropriate for use with young children in New Zealand; (d) the need for more time outside the classroom for assessment and reflection on assessment results; and (e) interest in professional learning and development, and teaching resources to support oral language competencies.

Appendices

Appendix A—Survey Question Details

• (1) Oral Language and Emergent Literacy—Commonly Used Tools:

  • a. Do you use the School Entry Assessment (SEA) tool?

    If yes, which SEA sub-tests do you use?

    • i. Oral Language (“Tell Me”)?

    • ii. Literacy (“Concepts About Print”)?

    • iii. Numeracy (“Checkout”)?

  • b. Do you use the Concepts About Print (CAP) assessment?

  • c. Do you use Running Records?

  • d. Do you use the Junior Oral Language Screening Tool (JOST)?

• (2) Oral Language and Emergent Literacy – Other Tools:

  Do you use any other forms of assessments during the first YEAR of school? Including commercially available, or your own school/teacher developed assessments? These can be one-off assessments or used for progress monitoring.

• (3) Respondents’ Preferred Format for Assessments

  What would be your preferred format for assessing children’s early vocabulary-oral language and literacy during the first YEAR after starting schooling?

• (4) How Respondents Use Assessment Data:

  How do you use the information gained from assessments administered just after children start school (e.g., tools such as the SEA, JOST, CAP, Running Records, Book Levels, and/or your own)?

• (5) Respondent Assessment Toolbox Wishes:

  What would you find useful to add to your toolbox for assessing children’s early language and literacy skills within their first YEAR of starting school?

• (6) Final Comments:

  Is there anything else you would like to add, that was not addressed in this survey?

• (7) Demographic school information, including school region, area (urban vs. rural), composition (Restricted Primary, Full Primary, Composite), population (co-ed, single sex—boys, single sex—girls), type (state including integrated, private, charter, other), use NZ curriculum, U-rating (roll size), decile, approximate ethnicity composition of students, and whether they have a bi-lingual unit.

• (8) Demographic teacher information, including current roles, years teaching at Year 0/1, registration status, gender, and ethnicity.

Appendix B—Letter-Name, Letter-Sound and/or Phonological Awareness/Phonics Knowledge Example Quotes

%	Assessments
22	Letter name only, e.g., “Letters of the alphabet identification”.
5	Letter sound only, e.g., “teacher/school derived based on sound recognition of letters”.
20	Letter name and sound, e.g., “An assessment by Joy Allcock to determine sound and letter knowledge”.
6	Letter name, sound, and word beginning with sound, e.g., “Identifying letter names, sounds, upper and lower case and a word that begins with that letter”.
4	Blends/digraphs, e.g., “Testing knowledge of digraphs - long vowel sounds, r controlled vowels etc.”.
10	Yolanda Soryl Phonics Assessment, e.g., “Yolanda Soryl Phonics”.
3	Phonological awareness assessments, e.g., “Liz Kane Phonological Awareness test”, “Phonological screening Test”, and “Phonological Awareness test”.
2	Jolly Phonics, e.g., “Phonics using Jolly Phonics”.
2	Phonemic awareness, e.g., “Phonics/Phonemic awareness”, “Sound out strips - decoding ability”, and “Initial sounds and rhyming awareness”.
1	Sound knowledge, e.g., “Sound knowledge check”, and “sounds like fun sounds”, “Sounds Alive”.

Appendix C—High Frequency (Sight) Word Example Quotes

• “School set of words”.

• “School generated words from Readers”.

• “Yolanda Soryl Early Words”.

• “Duncan word lists or other HF word lists”.

• “Marie Clay - Word Reading”.

• “BURT word test”.

• “High frequency words from readers colour coded levels - i.e. magenta, red etc.”.

• “Sails word lists”.

Appendix D - Informal Teacher Judgements Example Quotes

%	Assessments
29	Writing sample, informal prose, and story writing, e.g., “Writing Samples - Formally assessing writing once a term”, “Writing sample every term judged against school derived rubric”, “writing sample - included in learning story (samples collected and displayed in book for parents and child to see)”, and “Analysis of independent writing skills (story writing)”
5	Motor, e.g., “fine motor skills”, “Pencil grip”, and “physical assessment - Assessing key fundamental skills balance, body awareness, locomotor, fitness, co-ordination”
5	Drawing, e.g., “Draw a Man”, “Draw a person assessment”, “Drawing - self-portrait”, and “Goodenough Test”
3	Behaviour/Social/Development, e.g., “Social Skills”, “do they share news, have made some friends, pack and unpack their bag”, and “Observation of behaviours - Checklist/teacher anecdotal comments”

Appendix E—Writing Vocabulary Example Quotes

%	Assessments
10	General writing vocabulary, e.g., “Marie Clay writing vocab - children write down words that they know how to write e.g. name, Mum, Dad”, and “Words I can write - Words the student can write independently”
5	Writing vocabulary - number of words written in X time, e.g., “How many words can you write in Ten minutes”.

Appendix F: Expressive and Receptive Language Example Quotes

%	Assessments
10	Oral Language, e.g., “oral language survey”, “Oral Language - Retell”, and “Oral language assessment”
2	Barbara Brann Assessment, e.g., “Barbara Brann building blocks to literacy”, and “Barbara Brann - talking, listening, moving, looking, print”
1	General vocabulary, e.g., “Talk to learn”, “Children are shown a picture and asked to tell what is happening in the picture”, and “Listening Skills”
1	Vocal/Auditory Association Test, e.g., “Auditory Association Test”, “Vocal Association Test”, “auditory-vocal association test”, and “Auditory Word Association”

Appendix G: Respondents’ Assessment Toolbox Wishes Example Quotes

%	Dominant Themes Identified
52	Oral language assessment tool appropriate for use in NZ, easy to use, and up-to-date, e.g., “more up-to-date oral language assessment tools available and provided to schools”, “We need a normed/standardized test for Oral Language that is easy to administer and actually measures oral language”, “Some activities to assess receptive language”, “A universal oral language assessment for all New Entrants”, “An easier assessment of children’s oral language - JOST takes too long”, and “An easy to administer oral language test to determine if children need additional oral language input. Must contain modern language that children in Northland would be familiar with”
13	Assessments that are modern, quick, and simple to administer, e.g., “A basic overall assessment that is quick to administer”, “A quick, maximum-usefulness, minimum fuss tool to pinpoint errors”, and “Some more up to date and relevant to NZ assessment tools. These need to be easy to administer and evaluate”
12	Common practices across NZ schools, e.g., “Standardised testing across all schools”, “a simple to administer, but very informing set of assessments that can be repeated across the first year of schooling, that are standardized, possibly across all schools”, “a specific tool used across all schools”, and “Assessments across all NZ schools to be the same”
11	A need for measures to assess phonological awareness and related skills, e.g., “phonological assessment, easy and practical to administer and standardised”, “Phonemic Knowledge assessment”, “Phonics skills assessment for how they use and apply their sound knowledge”, and “Phonological awareness of sounds at end of words/syllabic knowledge in words-clap the syllables/do these words rhyme/what word rhymes with”
10	Assessments of other competencies, e.g., “an assessment that covers the whole child physically, social/emotionally, cognitively, and looks at key competencies”, “Looking at basic reflexes and perceptual skills that need to be developed to access language and literacy”, “an evaluation of social skills/self-management”, and “Basic info like shapes, colours, scissor skills, motor skills etc. being included”
8	More supported time outside the classroom to do and interpret assessments, e.g., “Time to administer them!”, “Funded time out of the classroom to do the assessments”, “More release time given to teachers to do more assessments and analysis” and “More release time given to be able to do these more effectively and use the data”
7	Oral language teaching resources and professional development (PD), e.g., “More support and time around oral language programmes”, “I would like to use an oral language assessment tool and have appropriate teaching material to support the needs of my students.”, “a greater understanding of the Oral language Matrix and Progressions of Oral Language with quality PD for all teachers and leaders”, “Oral Language professional development for teachers”, “Something that gives me suggestions of practical steps to support Oral Language development in areas of identified weakness”, “A greater value given to oral language, pronunciation, talking and recognition of its importance in a child’s future reading, writing and communication abilities/progress. Standardised checks? Teacher training?”, and “A guide for a structured oral language programme which could operate in a NE/Year 1 classroom (like guides for other curriculum areas). More in-service opportunities in oral language. There needs to be more emphasis from MOE that this is a very important aspect of the class programme at this level…..essential for writing and reading”
4	Comprehensive kit assessing basic skills (e.g., alphabet, colours, shapes, numbers, speech), e.g., “A specific assessment pack that has letter ID, sound, number and shape knowledge etc. So every NE teacher is using the same assessment”, “An easy tool that has oral language, letter and sound knowledge and a word list. Able to be repeated”, and “Easy to use kit, that assess the basic skills (alphabet, colours, shapes, numbers, speech)”
4	Handwriting assessment and exemplars, e.g., “I find evaluation of writing the hardest. We do undertake writing samples and compare them with exemplars, National standards, e-AsTTle, the writing progressions but I find these judgement hard to be accurate in for some children”, “A more detailed breakdown of level one writing progressions. A specific rubric of level one”, “Writing or letter formation assessment”, and “More writing assessment exemplars for New Entrants”
3	Access to increased support from speech language therapists and other specialist teachers, e.g., “Access to more speech language teachers/hours to assist learners with oral language skills and to assist with their inventive spelling”, “Assess to speech therapists!!”, and “Money needs to be available so there are no waiting lists for children with speech or hearing difficulties”

Appendix H: All Final Comments—Quotes

• 1. “Is the government taking into account where the current 5 years olds level of learning is when they start school…and how that compares with the progress the government is expecting in the first year of schooling to get to the National Standard of after 1 year at school… some of the children we are enrolling now have literacy/oral language levels similar to a 3 year old… or worse”.

• 2. “I find it difficult working with the National Standards, especially when children start school with very low literacy and oral language”.

• 3. “I think we are having more and more children starting school who are not school ready. This is especially evident in boys, many of whom: have never held a writing or drawing implement, cannot toilet themselves, are unused to reading/looking at books, listening to stories, etc. On top of this, there seem to be more extremely defiant and emotionally unstable children. It is getting to the point where I am suggesting to parents that they get counselling support for their children.”

• 4. “In my 35 years of teaching I have seen a consistent decline in children’s ability to communicate orally and pronounce/enunciate English words when starting school. This, to the detriment of associated written language. We have a wide range of socio economic backgrounds and all are the same.”

• 5. “Levels of oral language is worryingly low in our new entrant intakes. We are changing our practise in an attempt to remedy this early on in their school life. Seems to be a NZ wide issue.”

• 6. “Need to look at teacher training. Not enough class time in a classroom. A few of our children are arriving with no to little understanding of spoken language.”

• 7. “Oral language is a huge area of interest in our school and we are seeing a deterioration of language skills which is causing difficulties further up the school.”

• 8. “Over the many years I have been in the classroom it has become more and more noticeable that the lack of oral language is more prevalent in children starting school. Many children are not equipped with basic language skills required in order to access the NZ curriculum.”

• 9. “We are concerned with the number of children who are arriving at school and are simply not ready for formal learning. This year I have had 2 children who I have had to toilet train and another 3 who were unable to hold a pencil due to weak muscles. There are many others who have poor language. This year’s learners are not untypical of the learners arriving at school. I think the strain on New Entrant teachers is enormous because National Standards don’t take into account what children arrive at school with.”

• 10. “All these tasks take a lot of time - more release time needs to be allocated to junior teachers to support this. Early childhood centres need to be made more accountable for getting children better prepared for school - their curriculum does not match well with ours - or better still get rid of the standards.”

• 11. “Asking teachers how much Ministry help/finance if any is available for new entrant children with low oral language skills or what teachers can access to assist those who begin school with low to severely low language skills/knowledge.”

• 12. “Assessment tools for ESOL especially when no one in our school speaks Pasifika plus no access to outside support.”

• 13. “Assessments based on old research and comparing stanines from the 1960s is not fair, valid or useful.”

• 14. “Both the teachers of Year 0-1 completed the XXX Project with XXX University last year. We are using picture books to bring in new vocabulary and introduce two new words a week which we practise using. After hearing XXX we have worked very hard on developing dialogical classrooms rich in oral language opportunities. Both of these PD opportunities had a huge impact on our understanding of oral language development and of creating opportunities to develop this in young children.”

• 15. “Children starting school at 5 are not developmentally ready to be in most formal traditional instructional styles of teaching. If we are assessing children we are putting them in stressful situations. We take them away from learning time. We put pressure on ourselves to start teaching to the test. We need to ask ourselves why we are doing a particular assessment, what use is it & who is it actually for? Assessment can become a method of appraising teachers, & rushing students when they are not ready.”

• 16. “Our school is a XXX school, so Oral language is a HUGE factor but JOST was not an ideal way to assess, as it took too long to administer. We have changed the way we teach literacy this year. It is based around an Australian programme that is dyslexia friendly. Children learn to read decodable texts BEFORE they move onto any other type of text. More confidence and reading skills are evident but not yet matching National Standards.”

• 17. “Have participated in PD around oral language in the classroom and its importance in all literacy learning. Have used Talk to Learn resource, socially speaking. Lots of resources but often too intensive for daily classroom use with time constraints and other classroom requirements. Most of my oral language assessment is undertaken integrated with other tasks, e.g. reading and writing topic work. Would be good to have a simplified checklist, which can be monitored across the curriculum. Concerns are often around children’s annunciation of words, the impact this has on reading and written, children’s comprehension of and breadth of usable vocab.”

• 18. “How hard it is to get help for children with communication difficulties. We have identified several children with communication difficulties. I team teach, between us we have over 60 years’ experience, and we asked for help and were asked why we had referred so many children. It is very hard to access help when you recognise needs. We are trying to give children the best start rather than requiring full time teacher aide assistance four years down the track when the children are isolated and disengaged.”

• 19. “I am interested to know: How are the kindergartens and early childhood service providers helping to improve children’s oral language and literacy skills before they start school?”

• 20. “I am not huge on assessment as I believe we do too much and quite often wonder, who is this actually for? The way I assess is in as relaxed an environment as possible. I relate much more to the philosophy of Education that is used in Finland. I believe we used to have a much stronger education system in New Zealand and we had a good reputation in the past. I do not understand why we are starting to follow other systems, which are putting children into standards and limiting them rather than celebrating individuality. I am becoming more and more disillusioned at the direction we are going and don’t know if I will continue being a part of it:-)”

• 21. “I believe at this year level student achievement levels should not have to meet national standards. These should be brought in with students who are year 4 up. If we look at Nathan Mikaere Wallis studies. I truly agree with his take on brain development and students all be ready at different stages. There are not many generated tools for assessment at this level and it is up to teachers often to have very good tracking sheets and systems in place to track and show achievement. Our assessments are ongoing and generated by needs based. Each student’s journey is different and different assessments are put in place to meet their needs.”

• 22. “I feel teacher education around emergent literacy instruction is currently inadequate, and many teachers new to teaching have little to low knowledge about best practice. They rely on support from their school or other teachers whose own knowledge of effective emergent literacy teaching may not be ideal.”

• 23. “I look forward to seeing the results. Thanks”

• 24. “I think oral language is very important in our Year 0/1 classes. I find it hard to address specific needs in the classroom, and think it needs to be incorporated throughout all learning.”

• 25. “I think that assessments that are standardised are good but overall teacher judgement is valuable as they know all about the child not just a number.”

• 26. “I think we have sufficient assessments currently in our system. More time spent actually teaching would benefit all students.”

• 27. “I think we tend to assess too much at times. I use a lot of Observations. And am usually more concerned with observing the KC’s.”

• 28. “I’m finding many children coming in are not ready for the NZ curriculum and are below track when approaching 6 months of being at school.”

• 29. “It would be good to have some sort of assessment of key competency/social skills.”

• 30. “It would be great to have a person who was able to test the children who are ESOL in their own language before we do our testing to see if they are fluent in a language or their own language. There are many language issues that are not related to second languages but are masked by the fact the child is not an English speaker. Some of the OE tests we do are not done later on however they evolve into other things such as a simple book test done at the beginning becomes running records as the children begin to understand reading, words and what books are about. Many of the children I teach do not even make it on to the scale of some of those tests discussed at the beginning so it would give not use able data for us to help us make judgements and set up teaching programmes. We did do some major testing 2 or 3 years ago to be part of a programme in XXX however there was so much paper work and very little data of use we gave up and went back to something that made sense to us and was helpful in getting the children going.”

• 31. “It’s great to see someone looking specifically at NE’s as there is very little research around this level. I will look forward to reading the findings and for anything new that would support the learning of our tamariki! Good luck with this!”

• 32. “This was interesting and we need some assistance with these children but it needs to start at EC and then flow onto us inn Primary.”

• 33. “No, am looking forward to the results. I have done a personal study on the new entrants entering school and have noted that some of them have the oral language ability of 3 and a half year and this certainly slows down reading readiness as we have to develop the vocabulary first. We used to use the old Illinois Test of psycholinguistics to test our new entrants as we could gather pre and post data. I only use it now when I am concerned about why a child isn’t making progress.”

• 34. “Not really. Testing is good, but TIME is a huge issue. If you’re looking at giving us some form of oral language assessment, please make it quick and simple to use. I believe we do need an oral language resource, but not a complicated, hard to use one, which takes a lot of time. Also, an observation through my years of teaching - a lot of our younger students are coming to school with increasingly poor oral language skills. AND…finally, am just reading the recently released Louise Dempsey and Sheena Cameron’s ‘The Oral Language Book’. It’s got some great, practical ideas.”

• 35. “Professional Development structures deliberately aimed at new entrant teaching???”

• 36. “Resources required to follow up with children who are identified very early on. Many resources i.e. RTLB won’t or don’t touch kids until age 7-8. There are many children arriving at school very under prepared and there seems to be a large gap between early childhood and early primary. Assessments to identify at risk children need to be introduced much earlier i.e.: ECE to capture and address these issues for these children. National standards does not help students who are in this area they are forever catching up and being made to feel inadequate compared to their peers.”

• 37. “Teachers need more support on new entrant testing as the sea kit is out of date!! Lots of schools don’t have them.”

• 38. “Teaching New Entrants is a privilege, very demanding but extremely rewarding. The most important aspect is providing a transition between Early Childhood and School…educators really do need to work much more closely in order to provide a smooth, successful transition for all our students. It would be great if Government recognized and supported us in this!”

• 39. “That my OTJ still plays a part in when and what I use as assessment.”

• 40. “The power of observation is huge - having been trained in early child hood as well as primary - observation of the children plays a vital role in assessing student’s capabilities.”

• 41. “There is a lot of pressure on the children and us to get them to a certain point in reading and writing that for quite a few children is not achievable in the first year. I think that there is too much assessment in a child’s first year at school. It is sad when a five year old thinks they are failing because they are struggling to learn something!”

• 42. “This is a fabulous idea - I will be really interested in reading the results.”

• 43. “Useful PD that I have had to assist with teaching Oral language is the Joy Allcock XXX and Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey with their Oral language book.”

• 44. “Waiting until students start school to assess oral language is too late. We need to be working with students in pre-school settings. From my research over the past year it has become obvious that specific targeted language activities are required and what l would have normally considered as being a balanced program is not specific enough.”

• 45. “We are spending time assessing 5 year olds at the cost of participating in activities that are full of fun while developing oral language and literacy.”

• 46. “We really need some more specific oral language assessments for children beginning school! Thank you.”

• 47. “Would love to read the results and find out more what other New Entrant teachers use for assessments.”

• 48. “Thank you for the opportunity to do this survey.”

• 49. “Thank you.”