Action Picture Test: 5th Edition

The Renfrew Action Picture Test has been used since its first publication in 1967 by SLTs, SENCOs, teachers and other health and educational professionals to assess the speech and language development of children who are between 3 and 8 ½ years of age.

It covers words used to convey information (i.e. nouns, verbs, prepositions); present, past and future tenses; irregular forms of plural and past tenses; simple and complex sentence construction; and passive voice. The test provides an Information and Grammar score that can be benchmarked against a UK school population. This is the latest 5th edition (2019) which has been fully updated, including revision of scoring guidelines, modernisation of images and, through an extensive nation-wide programme, fully re-standardised against a modern school population, making RAPT a trusted first-line tool in speech and language assessment.

Contents: 10 picture cards depicting a range of everyday scenarios, instruction booklet providing guidance on administration, scoring guides, scoring form.

Authors:

Catherine Renfrew: Catherine trained as a speech therapist at the Glasgow School of Speech Therapy, qualifying in 1944. She was awarded a Fellowship of the College of Speech Therapists in 1950 resulting from her thesis on speech assessment. As a Fulbright Scholar she attended a post-graduate course at the State University of Iowa in 1955-6.

After working mainly with school children in Lancashire and Nottingham she was appointed Chief Speech Therapist to the United Oxford Hospitals in 1953. During 1964-6, with leave of absence, she taught speech pathology as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Toronto. After leaving her post in Oxford in 1973, she travelled widely, lecturing in all five continents.

While working with school children she began developing norm-referenced speech and language tests to find out whether children who experienced difficulty with spoken language development made more progress resulting from speech therapy than expected from maturation. The Articulation Attainment Test was first published in 1963, the Action Picture Test in 1966, the Word Finding Vocabulary Scale in 1968, and the Auditory Discrimination Test in 1973.

This 5th edition was revised under the guidance of:

Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a Speech and Language Therapist, trainer and author of practical language development resources for teachers and SLTs. From 1996-2017 Stephen worked as a Speech and Language Therapy Services Manager in Hackney and the City of London. With 30 years’ experience in the field, he is co-author of best-selling resources ‘Language for Thinking’ and ‘Word Aware’. Stephen graduated in Speech Pathology from Flinders University, before attaining an MSc in Speech and Language Therapy from City University in 2000. He currently serves as Chair of NAPLIC, the UK organisation for professionals working with developmental language disorder.

Anna Branagan

Anna has 25 years’ experience as a Speech and Language Therapist. Anna trained in Leeds and now works for the NHS in both Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. In a specialist role she supports schools to develop inclusive practice. Anna works within a Youth Support Team with vulnerable teenagers. She is co-author of best-selling resources ‘Language for Thinking’ and ‘Word Aware’.