The Dynamic Assessment of Language Learning

Book excerpt: This is a practical, accessible manual for Speech and Language Therapists, Educational Psychologists and Educators who assess children with language impairments, explaining how and why to implement Dynamic Assessment and gives you a huge range of ready-to-use, practical tools. Where normal assessments simply identify deficits, Dynamic Assessment also identifies the child's potential to learn by allowing for prompts from you, during the assessment, thus far better informing your decisions about appropriate interventions and strategies to help the children you work with. What does this manual offer? Provides a concise introduction to the principles of Dynamic Assessment to make clear the enormous benefits of applying this approach to the assessment of language. Presents a full example of a Dynamic Assessment of Sentence Structure (DASS) to demonstrate how the principles are implemented and the findings applied to plan more effective interventions. All the materials for the DASS are included so that you can use this assessment immediately. Includes numerous templates, generic prompt sheets, score sheets and materials that you can adapt for use in Dynamic Assessments that you devise yourself. Written by Dr Natalie Hasson, a highly experienced Speech and Language Therapist who leads the field in researching the dynamic assessment of language, this is the only Dynamic Assessment manual of its kind.