Formal Language Tests. The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language Essay

Formal Language Tests. The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language - Essay Example The CASL can be used on children as old as 3 and adults up to the ages of 21. It is mostly through the use of CASL that you get a clear picture of an individual’s language processing skills and his structural understanding thereby proving to be a useful tool for documenting development of an individual from a very early age all the way to his post secondary years. It also applies to a person with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) set up guidelines used for recognizing language impairment mostly because the CASL functions solely on age-based norms. The CASL consists of 15 tests all of which aim to effectively measure one’s language processing skills; these focusing primarily on comprehension, expression and retrieval. The structure is measured by division into four language categories; these being†Semantic or Lexical, Syntactic, Superliguistic and Pragmatic† (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999).... is such that the most representative aspects of the language categories fall into the core measures whereas the supplementary aspect concentrates on providing additional information that aids in quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Also it is imperative to mention that for most CASL tests there are Descriptive Analysis Worksheets provided which enable an individual to focus on specific skill aspects for intervention. The Test Books that are provided are not only easy to use but aid the administration by serving as a fast and simple reference. The initial part of the book focuses on providing administration guidelines whereas the rest of it focuses on convenient record forms, which are for a range of ages (3-6 and 7–21). The sole purpose of the book is to provide ample room for an analysis for profiling, responses towards items, different scores and behavioral observations. The Oral and Written Language Scales (OWLS; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1996) is different from a CASL in the wa y it is a theoretically based measure which is applied individually and aims to measure receptive and expressive language for little children as well as adults. It is a test that is administered using oral as well as written components for ages 3 to 21 years, however the written expression is mainly for ages 5 to 21. The test takes about 20 minutes to administer, and along with its overall score, the OWLS Written Expression gives percentages for nine special skills areas that are divided into three main planes; ‘Listening Comprehension ( LC), Oral Expression (OE), and Written Expression (WE)† (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1996, p. 33). While these scales are developed and form a part of the same evaluation, the oral language component, that is LC and OE, are put together in the same manual while the