Oral and Written Language Scales, Second Edition
OWLS-II is a four-scale comprehensive language battery covering listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression on a single normative scale.
At a glance
- Publisher
- WPS
- Edition year
- 2011
- Age range
- 3;0–21;11
- Domain
- Comprehensive language
- Administration time
- 10–30 minutes per scale
Standard scores for this battery use a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 unless noted otherwise in the publisher manual. Always cross-reference against the current edition of the manual before clinical use — publishers update norms and scoring tables on regular cycles.
What OWLS-II is
The Oral and Written Language Scales, Second Edition is one of the few comprehensive language batteries that integrates oral and written language on a single normative reference. OWLS-II contains four scales — Listening Comprehension, Oral Expression, Reading Comprehension, and Written Expression — that yield individual standard scores and combine into Oral, Written, and Total Language composites. The integrated design lets clinicians compare oral and literate language performance directly, which is clinically meaningful for school-age children with language-based learning disabilities and for older students whose written language gap is the presenting concern but whose underlying oral language deficit is the actual diagnostic story.
Subtests and structure
- Listening Comprehension Scale
- Oral Expression Scale
- Reading Comprehension Scale
- Written Expression Scale
What OWLS-II measures
OWLS-II measures four integrated constructs: receptive oral language through listening comprehension items, expressive oral language through prompted production tasks, receptive written language through silent reading comprehension, and expressive written language through written response prompts scored on multiple criteria. The four-scale composite design is the test's defining feature, because it lets clinicians anchor a written-language complaint to either an oral-language foundation or a literacy-specific gap. The constructs are broad — none of the four scales is as deep as a dedicated single-domain assessment — but the cross-modality comparison is the value the test adds beyond a comprehensive oral-language battery alone.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Integrated oral-and-written design is rare in current comprehensive batteries
- Single normative scale enables direct cross-modality comparisons
- Useful for differentiating literacy-specific gaps from broader oral-language difficulty
- Each scale can be administered independently, which speeds up tailored assessment
Limitations
- No single scale is as deep as a dedicated single-domain assessment in the same area
- Written Expression Scale scoring is partly subjective and requires examiner training
- Cultural and dialectal variation affects the Written Expression scoring criteria disproportionately
- Lower district-level penetration than CELF-5 in U.S. school SLP practice
How language sample analysis complements OWLS-II
OWLS-II Oral Expression captures structured-task production but it does not produce a measure of spontaneous sentence length or grammatical complexity in connected speech. For school-age students whose written-language complaint masks an underlying oral-language deficit, a 50-utterance language sample is the assessment that puts numbers on the oral foundation. MLU-M, percent grammatical utterances, and clausal density from the language sample stand alongside the OWLS-II Oral Expression score and clarify whether the structured-task performance reflects the child's actual spontaneous grammar or is buoyed by the examiner-led prompts. Pair OWLS-II with the language-sample-worksheet for the strongest combined picture in the school-age literacy-and-language case.
“When the referral is for written-language difficulty in fourth grade, OWLS-II is the test that tells you whether the gap is in literacy alone or whether the underlying oral system is the real problem. The language sample tells you what to do about it.”
Get the full analysis
Pair OWLS-II with automated language sample analysis
Upload the audio from your session. ConductSpeech transcribes, computes MLU, NDW, PGU, and Brown's morpheme percentages, and writes a clinician-ready summary you can drop next to the OWLS-II scores in your report.
Free tools that pair with OWLS-II
MLU Calculator
Paste a language sample and get Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes and words, total utterances, total morphemes, and the matching Brown's stage. Implements Brown (1973) morpheme counting rules and runs entirely in your browser.
Open toolReading Grade Level Analyzer
Free interactive reading grade level analyzer for speech-language pathologists, school psychologists, audiologists, and rehabilitation clinicians. Paste a clinical report, parent handout, IEP summary, or informed-consent document and get Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, SMOG, Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, average sentence length, and a consensus grade classified against the AMA / NIH / CDC parent-readability target of grade 6 or below. Built for SLP report writing, IEP documentation, school and medical discharge planning, informed-consent review, and graduate clinical-writing training. Mobile-friendly, client-side, no sign-up.
Open toolLanguage Sample Worksheet
Free printable and fillable language sample analysis worksheet for speech-language pathologists. Five columns (utterance #, transcription, morpheme count, grammatical Y/N, notes), configurable row count up to 100 utterances, browser print produces a clean PDF, and an inline running summary tracks total utterances, total morphemes, and rolling MLU as you fill it in.
Open toolRelated assessments
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Fifth Edition
CELF-5 is the most widely used comprehensive language battery in school-age SLP practice, covering receptive and expressive language from kindergarten through age 21.
Comprehensive language · CASL-2Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language, Second Edition
CASL-2 is a flexible comprehensive language battery that lets clinicians assemble a tailored assessment from 14 subtests across lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic domains.
Comprehensive language · TOLD-P:5Test of Language Development - Primary, Fifth Edition
TOLD-P:5 is the comprehensive language battery for the early elementary range, valued for strong sentence-level grammar subtests and competitive psychometrics.
References
- Carrow-Woolfolk, E. (2011). Oral and Written Language Scales, Second Edition. WPS.
- Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., Hogan, T. P., & Weismer, S. E. (2005). Are specific language impairment and dyslexia distinct disorders? JSLHR, 48(6), 1378–1396.
- Nation, K., Clarke, P., Marshall, C. M., & Durand, M. (2004). Hidden language impairments in children: Parallels between poor reading comprehension and specific language impairment? JSLHR, 47(1), 199–211.