One of the realities of educational practice in the late 20th century is the increasing role of assessment, especially of children's oral and written language. While there are many issues and problems surrounding this assessment, one problem that needs to be addressed is the lack of alternative ways of assessing children's language and literacy for K-12 practitioners. There are many ways to approach the assessment of language and literacy. How one approaches the assessment of oral and written language depends, in large part, on how language is defined and on what purposes language is viewed as serving. In this book, alternative ways of assessing language are based on three different perspectives defining language and its uses: anthropological, socio-psycholinguistic, and literary. Although applying these perspectives to language is not new, only recently have educators and others taken seriously the need for assessment of language to be consistent with the perspectives of language underlying classroom instruction. Simply put, as language education (including reading, writing, and oral language) becomes increasingly based upon anthropological, socio-psycholinguistic, and literary principles, the assessment of language and literacy must also be based upon such principles. This book discusses and illustrates how to reconceptualize assessment in terms of the alternative perspectives outlined here.

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Introduction: What Is an Alternative? THE NEED FOR ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES Language, Culture, and the Implications of Assessment Toward an Alternative View of Writing Assessment /Anthropological Perspectives on Assessing Children's Language and Literacy The Language of Testing: An Ethnographic-Sociolinguistic Perspective on Standardized Tests You Can't Get There from Here Assessing Students as Members of a Literate Community Discussion: Assessment in My World SOCIO-PSYCHOLINGUISTIC Perspectives on Assessing Children's Language and Literacy Alternative Language Assessment: Communicating Naturally with Students in Assessment Contexts Assessing the Written Language Abilities of Beginning Writers Looking at Their Own Words: Students' Assessment of Their Own Writing Discussion: Making Assessment a Process Reader Response Perspectives on Assessing Children's Language and Literacy Children's Response to Literature: Isn't It Time We Said Good-Bye to Book Reports and Literal Oral Book Discussions? Assessing Literary Understanding Through Oral Language Children's Group Discussions of Literature: Fertile Ground for Informal Oral Language Assessment Discussion: Unleashing the Potential of Children's Responses to Literature Subject Index Author Index