As a part of the BSLA assessment, all of the children complete a task called "Oral Narrative" essentially they are read a story and are asked to retell the story in their own words (while looking at the pictures as a prompt) and then are asked to answer some comprehension questions about they story that they have just heard. Thanks to technology, all of the children's responses are recorded and analysed first by the computer and then checked by a teacher. The analysis of the "oral narrative" gives a run down of, the number of words used, the number of different words, the types of words used (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs). Here is a link to the academic study of the "Oral narrative assessment" and here is an example of how the task is scored.
Number of words: 61
Number of different words: 35
Number of nouns: 13
Number of verbs: 14
Number of adjectives: 0
Number of adverbs: 6
- Providing explicit instruction
- Modelling
- Using visual aids
- Engaging in conversations
- Providing feedback
- Reading books together
- Play-based activities
I am also interested in completing the webinar by GEM Literacy, "An Introduction to the Explicit Teaching of Vocabulary" and learning some different strategies to explicitly teach vocabulary to my learners.