• We recommend administering the LLARS after Stages 1-4 have been explicitly taught, and thereafter twice per year. If you are starting the LLLL program mid-year and/or have a composite class use the LLARS to assess each child and plan your teaching and starting point in the program using that data.
• LLARS is administered individually, across two sessions, twice a year:
  □ Subtests 1, 2 and 3 (if using) should be administered in the first session.
  □ Subtest 4 (unseen decodable text) should be administered in a separate session.
• The testing environment should be quiet and free from distractions.
• Students will use the same score sheet until they have completed the Little Learners Love Literacy® program. For this reason, use a different coloured pen each time you assess the same student.
• The LLARS works on a ‘discontinue rule’ – stop assessing when children make three errors within the same Stage in the subtest.
• When reassessing/re-administering the LLARS test, begin at the level at which the student started making errors. Further guidelines are supplied on the following pages for each specific subtest.

Purpose

Assess the student’s knowledge of the alphabetic code by asking the student to say the phoneme when they point to the grapheme.

Administration

Fill in the student’s details on the teacher form. Place the Subtest 1 Grapheme–phoneme stimulus sheet(s) facing the student. Say: Put your finger under each grapheme and tell me the phoneme it represents. Note: The language ‘phoneme’ and ‘grapheme’ are used throughout the LLARS, but you can substitute these terms with ‘letters’ and ‘sounds’ if this reflects language regularly used in your classroom. 

Discontinue rule

Continue assessing until the student makes three incorrect responses within a stage.

Scoring

Add the total correct responses and the number of prompts and note them on the Subtest 1 table, on the back of the teacher form. Mastery is 100% correct within a stage.

Tips

• Keep it quick - if children can’t recall the sound, move on.
• Remind children to point underneath each grapheme as they say the sound. 
• If you are unsure of which sound is correct for a grapheme, look at the Little Learners Speed Sounds and Chants videos for a demonstration. If you are in any doubt about how to say the sounds – head to our LLLL YouTube channel for demonstrations.

An example:

Notes on the example video:

• 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.

Purpose

Assess the student’s ability to decode unfamiliar nonsense (pseudo) 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.

Administration

Fill in the student’s details on the teacher form. Place the Subtest 2b Decoding nonwords stimulus sheet(s) facing the student. Say: These are not real words, but we can sound them out and blend to read them just like real words. Put your finger under each word and tell me what it says.

Discontinue rule 

Continue assessing until the student makes three incorrect responses within a stage.

Scoring

The student scores 1 point for reading a nonword automatically OR 1 point for decoding and blending a nonword correctly. No points are scored for incorrect responses, but note the student’s skills; e.g. identified grapheme. Add the correct responses and the number of prompts and note them on the Subtest 2b table on the last page of the teacher form. Mastery is 100% correct within a stage. within a stage.

Tips

• Keep it quick - if children can’t read the word, move on.
• Remind children to point underneath each grapheme in the word as they say the sound. 
• If you are unsure of which sound is correct for a grapheme, look at the Little Learners Speed Sounds and Chants videos for a demonstration. If you are in any doubt about how to say the sounds – head to our LLLL YouTube channel for demonstrations.

An example

• Subtest 2b follows the same format as 2a with the inclusion on nonsense words. 
• 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.

Purpose

Assess the student’s knowledge of the Stages 1–7.4 Heart words. These high frequency ‘tricky’ words will need to be learnt by heart in order to read connected text. In response to feedback, this subtest has been streamlined to include only Stages 1–4 Heart words.

Administration

Fill in the student’s details on the teacher form. Place the Subtest 3 Heart words stimulus sheet facing the student. Say: These are Heart Words. Put your finger under each word and tell me what it says.

Scoring

The student scores 1 point for reading a word automatically. No points are scored for incorrect responses, but note the student’s skills; e.g. identified grapheme. Add the correct responses and note them on the Subtest 3 table on the teacher form. Mastery is 100% correct within a stage.

Purpose

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. 

Administration

Select the appropriate stage to begin. For example, if the student achieved Stage 7 Unit 1 level for all previous subtests, start at the Stage 5 unseen decodable text. Otherwise, start at the Stage 1 unseen decodable text. When re-testing, do not use any unseen texts for which students have already reached target level.

Fill in the student’s details on the record form. Place the unseen text facing the student. Say: Read this story aloud to me. You can put your finger under each word as you read it.

Two comprehension questions have been provided on the teacher form for each text. Students can refer to the text to find the answers. The comprehension questions are not an assessment of memory. Students should be given appropriate thinking time for each comprehension question.

Discontinue rule 

A student does not need to reach the target in order to continue to the next stage of testing. Instead, continue assessing until the student makes three incorrect responses on a single line of text.

Scoring

The student scores 1 point for reading automatically OR 1 point for decoding and blending correctly. No points are scored for incorrect or prompted responses, but note the skills the student has exhibited; e.g. identified grapheme. Add the correct responses and note them on the Subtest 4 table. Note whether or not the student meets the target level by using Y or N. Note your fluency teacher judgement with F (fluent), D (developing) or B (beginning). To master the stage, students must score target level or above and be judged as developing or fluent, with the exception of Stages 1–4, where there are no fluency expectations required for mastery.

Marking Guidance - Fluency

Fluency is an ongoing developing skill – it comprises accuracy (decoding to read words correctly), pace (reading words with automaticity and at a natural pace) and prosody (reading with expression: pitch, volume, emphasis and pausing by using information from the text such as punctuation, vocabulary, content knowledge and fonts, for example). Fluency is vital for reading comprehension. LLARS requires a teacher judgement on the student’s fluency in Subtest 4. On the teacher form, write: F – fluent, D – developing or B – beginning. Fluency observation sheets for reading unseen decodable texts in Stages 4-7 are available as an Appendix for teachers who wish to use them. 

The observation sheets ask the assessor to consider the following.

•  Accuracy – students scoring beneath target level on the unseen text are not fluent.
• How many words were read automatically as opposed to decoding?
       As a rough guide, more than 90% automatic = fluent, 21–89% automatic = developing and less than 20% automatic = beginning.
• The assessor’s observations – Which of the following things did they observe, and how frequently?

Marking Guidance - Comprehension

On the teacher form, write:  

• Record student responses in the boxes provided. Children will answer with varying levels of detail and vocabulary.
• Score of 2 – student comprehended the story and answered both questions
• Score of 1 or 0 – student was not able to comprehend the story at an acceptable level; questions were not answered or were answered incorrectly.

Tips

• Make time - this subtest should be administered in a separate session
• Make use of the observation sheets to help inform your teacher judgement

An example

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.

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.

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.

Use the LLARS Excel templates to record and display your class results. This can also be used to present year-level data.The aim is the assess and monitor students’ skills to inform your teaching and identify the specific needs of each students.

The LLARS will identify exactly what students know and to what level that can apply their skills. Our aim is for every child to demonstrate mastery of each LLLL Stage.

Use the data to:
- plan your next term’s teaching – does anything need to be re-taught to the majority of the class?
- inform your tier 2 intervention groups – do you have any children with common specific skills problems or knowledge gaps that you could address in regular, short group sessions in addition to your usual lessons?
- make arrangements for tier 3 intervention – is any child not achieving as expected? Do they need a more intensive 1-1 program?
- identify areas that more able students need to work on/ could be stretched by– did your more able students read continuous texts fluently? Might they be ready to learn more morphology? Is there non-word reading score as good as their other scores?
-feedback to stakeholders -parents/carers, colleagues. This data can be used for report writing as it clearly identifies what the child has mastered, and what is the next step to teach.

The LLARS manual contains guidance and information for error analysis to inform your specific next steps for each child.(If you have a split year classroom and stream your students into groups, you can also use the LLARS to inform the grouping of your students.)

The LLARS supports an explicit and systematic synthetic phonics teaching approach. It will not correlate with benchmarking kits such as Fountas and Pinnell and PM, which are based on a balanced literacy approach. No phonics-based assessment will do this.Consider why you are assessing and what you want to find out from it. If you want to know what PM level book a child can read, then the LLARS isn’t for you. If you want to know what alphabetic knowledge and word reading skills your student has and what their next steps are to move them forward (based on reading-science) then the LLARS is for you. Your assessment must match your teaching approach and philosophy. To the best of our knowledge there is no state or federal requirement to report PM levels or similar. If you are concerned about this, you should discuss it with your leadership team and perhaps consider talking to a Little Learners Love Literacy school to share information and experience.The LLARS does work well with the TOPALL – Test of Phonological Awareness of Little Learners. The TOPALL was developed by Vikki Stone, a speech pathologist in Bendigo. The LLARS will not replace any specific special needs diagnostics that you already have in place. The LLARS can be used very nicely with the Phonics Screening Check. Use the phonics screening check at the end of Year 1 as a summative assessment to see if children have mastered the skills and knowledge required outside of the LLLL program’s progression. It is mandatory to do a Phonics Screening Check in SA at the end of Year 1. The NSW Dept of Education were trialling a Phonics Screening Check in 2020.

The quick answer to this question is no - the LLARS is not currently a norm-referenced test.What is a norm-referenced test? A norm-referenced test is an assessment (often made up of multiple-choice questions, but not always) designed to compare and rank your students with a comparison group of students. Test results are presented in percentiles (e.g. a percentile of 80 means that the student’s score is better than 80% of children who have already taken the test). This allows you to see if your students perform better or worse than a hypothetical average student taking the test.Norm-referenced tests work best and are most useful to us, if:- we are working off a common set of standards (curriculum) and therefore have common goals or benchmarks- the comparison group is roughly comparable to your students/classrooms- the assessment is online to capture the data- your aim is to compare students’ abilities.Norm-referenced tests are not usually used to tell you whether the skills and knowledge taught to date have been acquired and mastered by the student. An example might be to compare the purpose between an IQ test (compares people’s intellect against each other) and a quiz (do you have the knowledge or not?).How does the LLARS work instead?We ask that you get all your children to master Stage 6 by the end of Foundation year, and Stage 7.4 by the end of Year 1. These are our benchmarks for our teaching sequence. If they are achieved then children will have the skills and knowledge required to pass the Phonics Screening Check, and to progress into Year 2.The LLARS is freely available and can be used by schools who are teaching with the LLLL program and by those who are not - so long as the school is teaching systematic synthetic phonics and are aware of any difference between the LLLL Stages and their own teaching sequence.

The LLARS is free and can be downloaded from our website. You can also purchase a hardcopy LLARS Teacher Manual (or pack of manuals) from our website if you wish to.

Yes - the new edition of the LLARS includes a non-word (or nonsense word) test. Non-words test decoding and mastery of PGC knowledge. Non-words are not real words, but they use phoneme-grapheme correspondences in a regular way so we can decode them and read them out loud. Words like ‘zog’, ‘brip’ and ‘flait’ are examples of non-words.The Little Learners Love Literacy® program is designed to get children reading and spelling at a mastery level and non-words are an effective tool for assessing this. It is impossible for students to recognise or memorise non-words because they have never seen them before - they have to use their phonic knowledge to sound out and blend to read these unfamiliar words. This is especially useful in the early stages when CVC words are often familiar high-frequency words. If children can recognise and read these familiar words this is great news, but we also need to be sure they have mastered the phonics content you have taught. Non-words simulate the scenario we want to prepare ALL students for - being able to read any word familiar or not by using their phonic knowledge. Non-words are an assessment tool only. Non-words should not be taught or practised; they are not otherwise part of the Little Learners Love Literacy® program. A pronunciation guide is provided in the teacher materials for your reference.