15 TILLS subtests FINAL

The 15 Subtests of

A better way to assess language and literacy skills

Vocabulary Awareness

Function: To assess a student’s lexical knowledge, awareness of semantic relationships, and cognitive-linguistic flexibility.

Task: The student must be able to first identify a pair of semantically related words from a triplet of three words, and then switch sets to identify a second semantic pairing.

Sample Items:

Phonemic Awareness

Function: To assess a student’s awareness of the individual speech sounds of language (phonemes).

Task: The student must isolate single sounds within real words or nonsense words and manipulate them by removing them from the initial position of words.

Sample Item:

Story Retelling

Function: To assess a student’s ability to listen to, comprehend, and retell a story.

Task: The student will listen carefully as the administrator reads an age-appropriate story. The student’s job is to tell the story back to the administrator in the same way.

Sample Item:

Nonword Repetition

Function: To assess a student’s speech perception, the ability to hold a sequence of speech sounds in memory, and the ability to reproduce those speech sound (phonological) sequences accurately.