Meet Ash ...  she's doing the LLARS

Meet Ash ... at the end of Foundation she did her very first LLARS (Little Learners Assessment of Reading Skills). Having not been taught with Little Learners Love Literacy® in her first year of school the purpose of this LLARS assessment was to check what knowledge and skills Ash had ... and what gaps. She did a great job.

Watch Ash complete each subtest below. We often get asked for video examples when teachers start out with this reading assessment - we hope they're useful.  As you watch the videos, think about the skills Ash is demonstrating and the knowledge you gain from this assessment. You might like to download the LLARS manual and mark along to the videos for practice, too.

Subtest 1 - Phoneme-grapheme correspondances

What is it? This subtest assesses the student’s knowledge of the alphabetic code by asking the student to say the phoneme when they point to the grapheme.

So. what did we observe?

• Ash was able to say the sound for every grapheme Stages 1-5, achieving 100% correct (mastery).
• At Stage 6 Ash didn’t know tch or ph. No responses were given and so they were marked with a line above them. Ash self-corrected for wh and received a tick.
• At Stage 7 Unit 1 Ash made 5 errors. The assessor can stop the subtest once the student makes three mistakes within the stage. In this case the assessor let Ash continue until the end of the stage and then ended the assessment.
• Incorrect response: ‘ing’ for igh – guessing based on common suffix. The assessor noted the incorrect response above the grapheme.
• Incorrect response: -Y /y/ ignoring the dash indicating it is a y on the end of a 1-syllable word (which always makes the long /ī/ sound. The assessor noted the incorrect response above the grapheme.
• No response: ea –y ie. The assessor drew a line above each of these graphemes
• She did know some of these long vowel phoneme-grapheme correspondences and these were ticked.
• No prompts were given. Ash hasn’t been taught with the program yet and so the mnemonic prompts wouldn’t have been useful to her.

For full administration and marking procedure, please refer to the LLARS manual and/or our LLARS webpage.

Subtest 2 - Nonword decoding

What is it? This subtest assesses the student’s ability to decode unfamiliar nonsense (pseudo) words. These words are not real words, but follow the orthographic rules of English.

So. what did we observe?

• Subtest 2b follows the same format as 2a with the inclusion on nonsense words.
• These words are not real words, but follow the orthographic rules of English, meaning children can decode them using their grapheme–phoneme knowledge, but cannot guess them or recall them from memory.
• It is essential to refer to the Nonword pronunciation guide when marking.
• Ash is decoding the pseudo words in Stage 1 despite having read Stage 1 words in Subtest 2a automatically. We would expect to see this as the children will not have had the same level of exposure to these words.
• At Stage 3, Ash made an error identifying ret as red, she was able to self-correct and would receive a point for correctly reading the word. 
• Ash read all words correctly in Stages 1-4 and demonstrated mastery of these stages.
• With prompting, Ash was also able to read 100% of the words in Stage +4 accurately and demonstrate mastery. The assessor would note the prompting on the teacher sheet.

For full administration and marking procedure, please refer to the LLARS manual and/or our LLARS webpage.

Subtest 3 - Heart words (OPTIONAL)

What is it? This subtest assesses the student’s knowledge of the Stages 1–4 Heart words. These high frequency ‘tricky’ words will need to be learnt by heart in order to read connected text.

This subtest was not filmed but follows the same format as Subtest 2. Because these high-frequency words have been memorised, we would expect to see more automaticity when reading these words.

For full administration and marking procedure, please refer to the LLARS manual and/or our LLARS webpage.

Subtest 4 - Unseen decodable text

What is it? The unseen decodable stories assess the accuracy, fluency and comprehension level of the student at each Little Learners Love Literacy® Stage. The subtest is similar to a running record.

Ash started her LLARS Subtest 4 at Stage Plus 4. She read Stages Plus 4, 5, 6, 7.1.

Ash reached target level at Stage 6. At Stage 7 Unit 1 she did not. She also could not answer the comprehension questions - lower levels of accuracy and less automatic reading resulted in low fluency and therefore low comprehension of what she was reading,

So. what did we observe?

Accuracy: Ash read 62 out of 86 words accurately, meeting the target level of 61 words.

Automaticity: Of the 62 words Ash read correctly, 48 were read automatically. We would say Ash is developing automaticity as more than 10% of the words were read with decoding.

Comprehension: Ash was able to answer the comprehension questions correctly which showed she had an understanding of the text. When Ash used what she could see in the picture to support her answer, the assessor asked her to find evidence in the text as well, which she was able to do.

Fluency: Ash consistently demonstrated some behaviours of a fluent reader. She read every word in the text, tracking with her finger, and used appropriate volume throughout. At times, we observed Ash reading with good pace and appropriate expression but as she worked through the text her reading became slower and more laboured. This suggests that most of Ash's working memory was used to decode the words and had an impact on her fluency, which is still developing at this level.

For full administration and marking procedure, please refer to the LLARS manual and/or our LLARS webpage.

Benchmark expectations

Keep in touch ...

Please head to the LLARS section of our website for more help - there's heaps available including a recorded webinar and step-by-step instructions. And of course, you are ALWAYS welcome to contact the Little Learners team with your LLARS queries, too.

Please remember to visit the website for lots more guidance and information - the LLARS isn't rocket science but it does take some practice to get into the groove. Once you have robust data to support your instruction you'll never look back! Best of luck.