This book provides a simple means of observing and recording a child's level of language performance, measuring progress, and isolating areas of difficulty. Any teacher concerned about observing children's language development will find the volume invaluable.

Biks and Gutches is an easy-to-administer-and-score task. It looks too simple to be very useful but with it we can easily predict which young children need extra help with learning English. Giving this assessment to individual children will help the teacher become a better judge of how a child's oral language is changing. The items can be used to evaluate whether a new teaching programme is having any effect. Change can be captured over two points in time. If the school has introduced some new or special instruction, Biks and Gutches can be used to evaluate its effectiveness. Results could point to the rate and kind of change that has occurred as a result of special attention. For children who speak a dialect of English the test can answer questions like this: Has the children's control over the rules for inflections of the standard dialect increased? Children usually learn and use both school and 'home' versions of English and they know when to use either version. Sometimes the nonstandard usage dominates, and this can have consequences for school assessments in standard English. Compare the test and retest scores to see the rates of change and any persistent problems. The items in Biks and Gutches were designed for the five- to seven-year-old age group but have been used successfully in research with children up to ten years old.

Written for specialists, leading teachers, graduates and academics, this in-depth study discusses the theories, questions and developments in early literacy intervention that have made Marie Clay a leader in this area.This thoughtful and challenging book allows people working in early intervention to draw on the success of others from around the world.

Focuses on the development of reading, writing, speaking and listening for children from birth to eight years.

The Wug Test is a picture book for children and adults that uses invented nouns, verbs, and adjectives to illuminate what children know about their own language. This book includes the original delightful Wug Test drawings and test questions created by Professor Jean Berko Gleason in 1958. The Wug Test, first given in research settings, showed that children do not learn language simply by memorizing what they hear. Instead, they learn the rules of their language so that they are able to make plurals, past tenses and other forms when presented with words they have never heard before. This book has pictures and interesting questions to share with children, along with informative notes and commentary for adults. It provides a fascinating insight into what even very young children know about language, as well as a way to understand and observe a child's acquisition of the rules of language over time. Ages 3-7.