VELS Level 1 and 2 - Writing Vocabulary and Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words
The observation tasks in this survey are designed to allow children to work with the complexities of written language. They illustrate how the student searches for information in printed texts and how they work with that information.
The Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement includes six assessment tasks:
- running records
- concepts about print
- letter identification
- word reading
- writing vocabulary
- hearing and recording sounds in words.
It is recommended that teachers obtain a profile of a student across all tasks. No single task provides a satisfactory assessment of progress in early literacy. (Marie Clay 2002)
Writing vocabulary
This task encourages students to write down all the words that they know. The student is given 10 minutes to complete the task. A series of systematic teacher prompts may be used if required.
This task is most useful over a one to two-year period, revealing how quickly a student is building up, and gaining a basic command, of writing vocabulary.
The value of this task, in predicting future changes in literacy, is diminished when the student can write more than 40-5 words. At this point the teacher should instead measure how the student does using more traditional spelling or writing tasks (Marie Clay 2002, p. 102).
Hearing and recording sounds in words
Going from phonemic awareness to letter-sound relationships, the teacher dictates a sentence for the student to write. To avoid a practice effect there are five alternative sentence forms that may be used for an initial assessment.
The student is encouraged to write down the sounds they hear in the words dictated. Scores show how successfully the student heard and recorded the sounds in English spelling.
The test is not a pure test of phonemic awareness because what the child has learned about spelling, or orthography, may also turn up in their recording. (Marie Clay 2002, p. 112)