Avenue Slash

Word Identification

What Is It?

Slash is a task that can be used as an indicator of a student's ability to identify words within a sentence or a short story fluently. Progress monitoring using Slash is based on research by Hammel, Westerholt, and Allen.

The Basics

Video illustrated directions and practice tasks are built into the software. The goals for each level are based on paper-pencil timed tasks. The goals will be revised as new studies are conducted with Avenue PM. Sentences are graduated in syntactic and semantic difficulty. Level 1 begins with basic Noun and Verb statements. Grammatical structures and context increase in complexity as the student moves from Level 1 through Level 8. A chart indicating the syntactic structures and approximate reading levels is available on the Avenue login page under the Links to Document button.

How it Works

Sentences appear on the screen in uppercase letters without spacing or punctuation. Students click between the words to build a meaningful sentence. The student has one minute to complete the task. If the student completes the passage before the end of one minute, the student clicks the Done button. The student may review the sentence for meaning and make corrections within one minute or click Done. The student can review the correct and incorrect items and review the score on the game bar. Students are required to complete each phrase without error. Slash scores are automatically graded and graphed. All students begin with basic sentence patterns. Each level increases in linguistic complexity. Slash is designed for students in the early stages of reading through approximately the fourth grade reading level.