Biks and Gutches New Edition Update

Biks and Gutches is an easy-to-administer-and-score task. It looks too simple to be very useful but with it we can easily predict which young children need extra help with learning English. Giving this assessment to individual children will help the teacher become a better judge of how a child's oral language is changing.

• The items can be used to evaluate whether a new teaching programme is having any effect. Change can be captured over two points in time.
• If the school has introduced some new or special instruction, Biks and Gutches can be used to evaluate its effectiveness. Results could point to the rate and kind of change that has occurred as a result of special attention.
• For children who speak a dialect of English the test can answer questions like this: Has the children's control over the rules for inflections of the standard dialect increased?

Children usually learn and use both school and 'home' versions of English and they know when to use either version. Sometimes the nonstandard usage dominates, and this can have consequences for school assessments in standard English. Compare the test and retest scores to see the rates of change and any persistent problems.

The items in Biks and Gutches were designed for the five- to seven-year-old age group but have been used successfully in research with children up to ten years old.

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon), Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.