The longest word you've never seen

I am going to share with you a darling response a student once gave in an assessment session, because it warms my heart whenever I think of it.  Now we don't go around telling people specific test items because it undermines the validity of the normative date we have, so you'll have to fill in the blanks that I am purposely leaving so that I can maintain the validity of our assessment.

I was assessing using the non-word section of a literacy test.  We often use non-words like (let me make one up) "strave" to see how well students can read and spell words that follow regular phonics rules but they most certainly haven't seen before.  If they are already familiar with a word, there is the possibility they are relying on their sight-word recognition skills rather than their phonics skills only.

In this test of spelling nonwords, my Year 5 student with autistic spectrum disorder was struggling.  He was a clever student, but found it incredibly difficult to use his 'sounding-out' skills to spell the simple one-syllable and two-syllable words I was presenting him.

And then I gave him a few three-syllable words.  He tried his best, but became a little unstuck at a tricky item halfway down the list.

He started well, and was on his way to getting full marks for that item.  However he didn't finish well, but I made a mental note about how close he was to getting that word correct and I was about to move on to the next item.

Then I saw that he was adding another letter to the end.  And another and another and another.  I'd already repeated the word once so wasn't able to repeat it again in the testing situation, but he didn't give any evidence that he'd lost the word from his auditory memory as he continued writing.

Then he hit the edge of the page!  I thought he would finish there, but no, he turned a 90 degree corner and kept writing down the right-hand margin all the way down to the bottom of the page! 

The target word had 10 letters.  His final response contained 34 letters, which included a double 'er' and three 3's.

I thought he was being silly, and expected him to look up with a cheeky grin on his face.

Instead he looked up, raised his eyebrows and said, "Phew!  That was a LONG word!!!"  Then he got ready for the next item.

I always enjoyed working with him!