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Assessing with Nonsense Words and Why You Should Start

 If we are strategically teaching letter/sound relationships (graphemes) then we are assessing strategically as well.  Using the word "strategic" means that our lessons and our language is intentional.  We are selecting what we teach and how we teach it consciously.  The ONLY way that happens is through assessment, be it formal or informal....we are assessing constantly so we know how to respond and what to teach.  Our students are giving us feedback all of the time and we need to watch, listen, and analyze.  When we are teaching letter/sound relationships on of the best ways to get a clear picture of student understanding is through nonsense words.

Let's talk about why nonsense words matter and how to use them so you can better support your students....


I'll expand a little on each of these reasons.  

1. Assesses letter/sound relationship knowledge (grapheme understanding)- Nonsense word decoding means that students are directly applying their grapheme knowledge to read words.  It clearly shows if students are able to correctly identify sounds AND if they are able to blend those sounds successfully into words.

2. Assesses letter/sound relationship knowledge without any other supports- This is HUGE and perhaps the most important.  The beauty of using a nonsense word assessment is that it strips away any other potential supports and gets directly at a students ability to use letter/sound relationships to decode unfamiliar words.  These are not real words so there is no way that orthographic mapping, schema, context or any other factor will impact a student's ability to read them....just their knowledge of letter/sound relationships.  Interestingly, I have worked with students who could read at high levels but struggled greatly with decoding nonsense words...which explained their poor spelling habits.  This helps to provide better instruction earlier for students who may fly under the radar otherwise.

3. Provides miscue information related directly to letter/sound knowledge-  We can do miscue analysis on any piece of text or word list, but the miscues can then be caused by a number of factors.  Using nonsense word lists instead enables teachers to gather miscue analysis that specifically relate to graphemes.  I want to be clear that when I say "miscue analysis" I am referring to looking for patterns or other pertinent information regarding a student's grapheme knowledge.  I am not talking about the kinds of analysis that can be conducted during a running record (semantic, syntactic, visual).  

Analyzing the performance of a student on a nonsense word assessment can provide a great deal of information.  Not only can track progress via how many words or sounds are read in a minute but there is much more.  (Side note: do not be afraid of using timed assessments to track automaticity, it's all in the approach to model how kids handle it)  

Information you can glean from these assessments:

  • direct letter/sound knowledge
  • blending ability- Is it all happening outloud or is the student able to blend the sounds without verbalizing each one individually first? 
  • short vowel knowledge
  • vowel confusion
  • b, d, p, or u, n confusion
  • flipping sounds- for example the word is "nop" and the student reads "pon"
  • verbalizing the sounds individually but then blending inaccurately 
All of these types of miscues and others can be better addressed during direct instruction that is armed with assessment knowledge.

Using nonsense words is a great way to collect specific information relating to student understanding of letter/sound relationships.  Give it a try!

Have questions? Send me a message!  If you're interested in more decodable resources visit my TPT store Simply Primary.






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