At a recent staff meeting of itinerant teachers of deaf/hard of hearing students, we had a work session on learning to plot a language sample on the CASLLS.  One of my fellow itinerant teachers came up with a brilliant time-saving idea.

She used Office 365 Word to transcribe her language sample.  With her sample open in Word, she clicked on the Home tab, then in the Editing Pane, clicked “Find”.

 

A Search Box appeared and she entered a structure that she was looking for such as “until” from the Complex Sentence Level.

Every occurrence of “until” was immediately highlighted!  You can also enter “ed”, “s”, “est” or ” ‘s ” and those structures will show up!  For verb tenses you can enter part of the verb such as “was” or “were” for the past progressive tense (“was/were + Verbing at the 4-4 1/2 year level).

This does not tell you the accuracy of the use of a structure – just whether or not it is used.  But it lets you calculate the accuracy quicker.

I know many of you are tech-savvy and were already familiar with this feature of Word but for some of us, it was amazing!