FORT

A third-grade teacher has been conducting a series of ongoing assessments of a student's oral reading. Shown below is a sentence from a text, followed by a transcription of a typical example of the student's oral reading performance.

Text: Her boots crunched through the snow.

Student: Her boats crucked throw the snow.

After reading the sentence, the student paused and then reread it without the teacher's prompting and self-corrected the errors. Based on this information, the teacher could best meet this student's needs by adjusting instruction in order to:

• enhance the student's oral vocabulary development.

• develop the student's ability to self-monitor comprehension.

• improve the student's decoding skills.

• promote the student's ability to track print.

Which of the following informal assessment results provides the clearest indication that a kindergarten child has attained a beginning level of phonemic awareness?

• The student can clap the "beats" or syllables of familiar multisyllable words

• The student can delete the second "word" or syllable in compound words.

• The student can identify the beginning sound of single-syllable words.

• The student can substitute phonemes in the medial position of single-syllable words.

One of the most important purposes of a standardized Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) is:

• to establish how prior knowledge and text organization influence a student's reading comprehension.

• to determine how a student uses semantic, syntactic, and other text clues to deduce a word's meaning

• to analyze how a student's silent reading comprehension is influenced by oral reading fluency.

• to establish a student's independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels.

Which of the following best describes the primary advantage of having a student read a passage silently and then provide a "retelling" as a means of assessing the student's comprehension, rather than having the student answer questions?

• A retelling is open-ended and requires the student to construct a description of the passage more independently of the examiner.

• The results of a retelling are more objective and easier to quantify than the results of direct questioning.

• The procedure involved in retelling tends to be more familiar to a wider range of students, including English Language Learners.

• A retelling can provide information about the student's inferential comprehension skills, which questioning cannot provide.

A first-grade teacher encourages beginning readers to "write" their own captions beneath their drawings. This practice is most likely to lead to which of the following?

• The students will tend to lose interest in writing because of their frustration with their lack of mastery of the English spelling system.

• The students' overall reading proficiency will be adversely affected by any spelling errors that go uncorrected.

• The students will tend to develop strong automatic word recognition skills from their interaction with print.

• The students' development of phonics knowledge will be reinforced as they experiment with their own phonetic spellings.

Which of the following is the most important reason for a fourth-grade teacher to assign a variety of high-quality trade books as a component of reading instruction?

• The themes typical of children's literature tend to reinforce students' development of literal comprehension skills.

• Reading across genres helps students develop an understanding of the structures and features of different texts.

• Simplified syntax and controlled vocabulary provide necessary scaffolding for students who are struggling readers.

• Reading diverse texts helps to promote students' development of phonological and phonemic awareness skills.

Frequent oral reading to kindergarten children using appropriate and expressive intonation and voices is likely to promote the students' reading development primarily by:

• improving their aural discrimination skills.

• explicitly teaching letter-sound correspondence.

• fostering their engagement in and love of reading.

• explicitly modeling phonological concepts such as word boundaries.

Asking students to listen to a word (e.g., same) and then tell the teacher all the sounds in the word is an exercise that would be most appropriate for students who:

• have a relatively low level of phonological awareness.

• are beginning to develop systematic phonics skills.

• have a relatively high level of phonemic awareness.

• are beginning to master the alphabetic principle.

A beginning-level English Language Learner can consistently blend individual phonemes to make simple English words composed of two or three phonemes but is having difficulty blending the sounds of familiar single-syllable words composed of four phonemes (e.g., clip, trap, spin). Which of the following questions would be most important for the first-grade teacher to consider when addressing the needs of this student?

• Are the target words in the student's oral vocabulary in English?

• Does the student's primary language have consonant blends?

• Can the student distinguish between short and long vowel sounds in English?

• Do the target words have cognates in the student's primary language?

A fourth-grade student reads on grade level and consistently scores very high on spelling tests that are part of weekly word study activities. However, the student often misspells the same words, and other familiar words, in everyday writings. The following table shows examples of typical errors the student makes on class writing assignments and in informal notes to friends. The student's overall spelling performance suggests that the student most likely has a weakness in which of the following foundational skills?

• detecting syllable boundaries in words

• sounding out and blending lettersounds to make words

• discriminating between a word's root morpheme and affixes

• segmenting and sequencing phonemes in words