3 Engaging Ways to Screen Articulation at the Sentence Level in Speech Therapy

Sometimes it’s so difficult to screen or assess articulation skills at the sentence level.

There’s an abundance of resources available, both free and paid, formal and informal, to screen and assess articulation at the word level. 

One of my favorite articulation assessment tools is the Bilingual Articulation and Phonology Assessment (BAPA) available as a subscription on a tablet. But, it can definitely get pricey, and the biggest downfall is that it does not assess articulation beyond the word level. 

I have put together three easy and engaging ways that you can screen, assess, or progress monitor your students’ articulation skills at both the word AND sentence levels.

1. Place various articulation targets (any and all that you want to assess) in a picture scene and prompt students to tell you what’s happening in the scene with a complete sentence.

This approach even works at the story and conversation levels.  It gives students an open ended way to use their target sounds.  

You may likely need something more structured... so give this a try:

2. Model a repetitive sentence from a book and ask the student to tell you the sentence with different articulation targets. 

"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? I see a _______ looking at me." Use the sentence frame but replace the blank with any articulation target!  This is a great way to assess whether students have the sound at the sentence level while using a very structured sentence.  Students who have trouble formulating sentences on their own will feel the most comfortable with this approach.

3. Pull articulation targets from a hat and use a visual sentence frame. Have students produce a sentence with the articulation target using the sentence frame. 

This is a fun and structured approach for screening and assessing target sounds at the sentence level. The students also love pulling words or pictures out of a hat or bucket.  Give the students a variety of sentence frames to pick from when producing sentences with their word.  The sentence doesn't always have to make sense semantically, but it's a plus if they can keep the syntactic structure in tact.

Want it all done for you?!

I spent over a year doing all the work for you!  I created 225 pictures scenes with 1,470 articulation targets and 225 visual sentence strips so that you can easily screen, assess, and target all of your students' articulation sounds at the word and sentence levels! The pre-designed visual sentence strips are the GOLD that supports sentence level assessment!  These pictures scenes and visual sentence strips are highly interactive; students have to cut, paste, color, and practice!!  The sentence strips and articulation targets are attached directly to each worksheet!  The truth is they have truly been a career-changer for me and a tool that I will use for the rest of my life!

Written by: Rosie Sepulveda, Language Encounters