## The 15 Subtests of

### A better way to assess language and literacy skills

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### 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:**

| light-sun-feather | light-sun-feather |
| --- | --- |
| sun gives light | feather is light |

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### 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:**

| Item | Phonetic spelling | Spoken response |
| --- | --- | --- |
| bip→ip | /bIp/→/Ip/ |  |

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### 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:**

| Item | Target spoken response |
| --- | --- |
| bup | /b^p/ |

### 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.