RICA: Reading Assessment 21-30

A first-grade teacher provides students with explicit, systematic phonics instruction to promote their reading development. When designing activities to teacher letter-sound correspondences, the teacher should:

• Provide reading opportunities for students to practice sounds in context after studying the sounds in isolation

• Make certain that students have mastered vowel sounds before focusing on consonants

• Ensure that students master the spelling of practice words using the target sound before teaching a new sound

• include instruction in related consonant blends when introducing individual consonants.

Early in the school year, a first-grade teacher wants to conduct an assessment of students' ability to read grade-appropriate words, including phonetically regular words and high-frequency words. Which of the following informal assessments would be most appropriate and effective for this purpose?

• The teacher pairs each student with a partner for shared oral reading of simple texts and makes anecdotal notes on their performance.

• The teacher meets individually with students and asks each student to write a list of words the student knows how to read.

• The teacher allows each student to select a grade-appropriate text from the classroom library and asks each student to try reading the text aloud.

• The teacher prepares a list of grade-appropriate words, asks each student to try reading the words aloud, and records the results.

Several first graders have mastered sounding out and blending words that follow simple short-vowel phonics patterns. Their teacher would like to help them begin to develop whole-word reading of words that follow these patterns. Which of the following instructional approaches would be most effective for this purpose?

• using teacher read-alouds followed by echo reading and then choral re-reading of the students' favorite texts that include some simple words

• scheduling frequent silent independent reading practice of word lists based on the students' oral language vocabulary

• providing modeling and guided student practice sounding out simple, regular words subvocally and then reading them aloud normally

• exposing students to common environmental print to provide frequent exposures to everyday words and phrases

When reading aloud texts, a second-grade English Learner often makes errors in pronunciation that are unrelated to her ability to accurately decode the words. The teacher's best response would be to:

• write down words the student mispronounces and include them on a list for her to practice reading aloud.

• analyze the student's pronunciation patterns and plan an intervention to address difficulties that may affect her reading comprehension.

• encourage other students in the class to help the student work on improving her accuracy in pronunciation.

• help the student avoid having pronunciation errors count as reading miscues by stopping her and having her correct her own errors.

Which of the following approaches would be most effective in helping first-grade students who have the prerequisite decoding skills learn to decode words that en in the inflectional morpheme -ing?

• explicitly teaching the students to read the unit -ing in isolation before teaching them to decode familiar words that end in the inflection

• using think-aloud during a guided reading to model how to use contextual analysis as a strategy for recognizing words ending in -ing?

• having student practice reading word lists that include words ending in both the more familiar rime -ing as well as the inflection -ing

• teaching the inflectional ending -ing in the context of an instructional unit on identifying open and closed syllables in multi-syllabic words.

An eighth-grade teacher wants to help students improve their spelling of scientific vocabulary, including the terms listed: barometer, centimeter, dehydrate, hydrogen, microscope, telescope, thermal, thermometer.

Which of the following instructional strategies is likely to be most effective for this purpose?

• showing students how to divide scientific terms into syllables to facilitate accurate spelling

• conducting practice drills to help students memorize the irregular spelling patterns of the words

• familiarizing students with the spelling and meaning of Greek morphemes in scientific terms

• helping students determine correct spellings by dividing the words into onsets and rimes

A sixth-grade teacher observes that several students have misspelled the word pasteurize. After writing pasteurize and Louis Pasteur on the board, the teacher explains how Pasteur invented the process of pasteurization. Student then discuss how the word Pasteur relates to the word pasteurize. This instructional activity fosters students' reading and writing development primarily by:

• helping them learn to use etymology to improve spelling and decoding of multi-syllabic words.

• helping them improve their ability to distinguish between similarly spelled words

• motivating them to use orthographic patterns to expand their vocabulary knowledge

• motivating them to improve their spelling and decoding through the use of systematic study skills

A third-grade student who is an advanced learner has already demonstrated mastery of the derivational suffixes -ness and -ment, which will be the focus of an upcoming whole-class decoding and spelling lesson. Which of the following strategies for differentiating instruction for this lesson would be most appropriate for this student?

• having the student work on inflectional suffixes

• teaching the student the content planned for the following lesson

• encourage the student to engage in independent silent reading

• introducing the student to higher-level derivational suffixes

Which of the following word pairs are homophones?

• answer and reply

• playful and replay

• table and stable

• sight and site

A second-grade teacher would like to include independent silent reading as one of several approaches used to promote students' fluency development. When planning differentiated fluency instruction for individual students in the class, the teacher should keep in mind that using independent silent reading to promote fluency:

• is most critical for students whose sigh-word knowledge is below grade level

• should be limited to narrative texts in the early elementary grades

• is most effective when students select texts at or above their instructional reading level

• should be limited to students who have already acquired automaticity