Description
Phonological awareness skills have been repeatedly shown to be strongly linked to reading and spelling outcomes. The Screen of Phonological Awareness (SPA) is a simple and effective screening tool which enables the examiner to determine whether a student is at risk of poor literacy outcomes by comparing the results with the performance of South Australian children on a range of phonological awareness tasks.
The SPA covers a broad range of early metalinguistic and phonological skills that have been correlated to literacy development. The items cover:
- word awareness
- rhyme awareness,
- syllable awareness
- sound awareness
- auditory memory and sequencing
- sentence repair
- letter recognition.
The information gathered is useful in developing intervention goals that are highlighted as a result of testing. This distinguishes the SPA from screening measures which aim only to detect whether a difficulty exists.
There are ten subtests in the spa and one supplementary subtest. The subtests are not arranged in the order in which the skills are acquired, but rather are grouped into word awareness, rhyme awareness, syllable awareness, auditory memory, sound awareness, auditory sequencing, sentence repair and grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
Age performance data is provided for four age-bands covering the range from 4 years to 5 years 11 months. The SPA can also be used for children above this age group when poor phonological awareness is suspected.
Contents: 1 manual, 27p; 2 photocopiable cards: record form and picture stimulus card
