TELLING TALES
Wordless Assessment for Pre-Readers,
Readers, and Language Learners

by Marilyn Low

Halfway through the school year, Lily, a grade 1 teacher, began to worry that several of her students did not understand the stories they were reading in class. Two students spent most of their time on letters
and sounds and were not reading words yet. Another child was struggling to recognize words because English was a new language for him. Lily wondered how she could assess their understanding of stories without using printed words.

Fortunately, there is a way to do this. The process is called “wordless assessment.” Working with one child at a time, the teacher uses pictures that combine to tell a series of events that make up a story. The child arranges at least three interrelated pictures. At this stage, the teacher observes the child, recording how the pictures are ordered and any comments the child makes. Then the child is asked to tell a story based on the pictures. The teacher listens for elements of story structure: character development, setting, a complication, a resolution, a lesson or moral.

Finally, the teacher asks the child questions to elicit a verbal account of the child’s related personal experiences, feelings about the characters, and ways of making connections between pictures. For example, as the child links one picture to the next, she may say “and then” or “because.” This provides the teacher with information about the types of connections made and the language resources used when the child tells her story.

As an assessment for learning, the information gathered from this oral process can help teachers such as Lily in a number of ways. Lily can reflect on the knowledge of story structure the children use and then plan to teach explicitly specific elements of story structure the next time they read a story together in class. She can also consider how to encourage the children to further develop the characters through feelings and dialogue. She can ask them to write the stories they told and to extend them in oral storytelling traditions. In that process, she can build on their language resources by exploring multiple ways to say “and then” and “because.”

Through the wordless assessment process, Lily has learned that children begin to develop an understanding of how stories work long before they learn to read the printed word. Using wordless assessment that employs visuals, she can elicit valuable information and determine how it can be used to support the reading needs of the children in her class. For more information about wordless assessment, contact Marylin Low at lowm@prel.org.