RICA Practice-Subtest 2

Lately, when choosing a book to read, a third grader who reads at grade level always selects books from a series that is written in a very formulaic style that does little to extend his conceptual or language development. The teacher's best response to this behavior would be to:

• avoid interfering with the student's selection of books as long as he finds his choices enjoyable

• provide the student with books with similar themes or on similar topics that are more challenging for him

•  point out to the student some of the major limitations of the books he is choosing to read and ask him not to read those books at school

•  advise the student that he should choose books that will prepare him for the more difficult reading he will encounter in fourth grade

A second-grade student has limited vocabulary knowledge, which hinders the student's word recognition and reading comprehension. The student's oral reading is slow and labored, and the student typically spends the majority of independent reading time browsing through books, making little effort to read the actual words on the page. Research has shown that which of the following is most likely to happen if this student receives no instructional intervention?

• The student will always be behind average-performing peers but will achieve an adequate reading level to be academically successful

• The student will naturally begin to show more interest and proficiency in reading as the student matures and will catch up with average-performing peers in third grade

•  The student will remain approximately at a second-grade reading level and will not be able to progress beyond this level

• The student will begin to fall behind peers in reading development and will continue to fall further behind in later grades as texts include increasingly difficult vocabulary

Which of the following statements best explains an important limitation of teaching students to rely on context as their primary strategy for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words in texts?

• Context clues have limited usefulness for students who already have well-developed background knowledge related to a text's subject or content

• Using context to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word disrupts students' reading fluency more significantly than simply consulting a dictionary

• Explicit context clues about a word's meaning are not very common in most texts, while implicit contextual clues often require students to apply background knowledge they lack

• Over reliance on context as a word-learning strategy hinders students' vocabulary growth, since they should be learning most new words in direct vocabulary instruction

A fifth-grade teacher is planning a multidisciplinary unit on water pollution. For this unit, students will read chapters from their social studies and science textbooks as well as relevant fictional narratives. These materials will also be incorporated into a variety of instructional activities designed to promote students' reading development. Which of the following statements best describes an important advantage of using a cross-curricular approach such as this unit to promote students' reading development?

• Interdisciplinary reading instruction provides more opportunities for teachers to tailor teaching strategies to the needs of individual students

• Reading instruction that focuses on both literature and content-area texts helps students recognize and understand differences between written and oral English

• Interdisciplinary reading instruction motivates students to apply a variety of word identification strategies to clarify the meaning of texts

• Reading instruction that integrates a variety of related texts promotes deep processing of new vocabulary through multiple exposures to key words and concepts

A middle school teacher writes the morpheme dict on the board, pronounces it, and explains that dict derives from the Latin word for "speak." The teacher then asks students if they can think of English words that start with or include dict. This activity is likely to promote students' vocabulary development primarily by helping the students:

• recognize common prefixes and suffixes

• learn the techniques of concept mapping

• apply knowledge of word roots as a word-learning strategy

• draw on a knowledge of phonics to unlock word meanings

A teacher substitutes blank spaces for several nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in an appropriate level of text and asks students to determine reasonable and logical words to complete each blank. This technique is useful as an informal assessment of students' understanding of English language structures primarily because it requires them to:

•  define various grammatical categories in their own words

• select appropriate words based on their grammatical function as well as on their meaning

•  group words into grammatical categories to clarify their meaning

•  draw on grammatical knowledge to identify the subjects and predicates of complex sentences

A fifth-grade teacher gives students the following sentence: Neither walking on the beach nor running around the track cheered Ahmed up. The teacher asks the students how the phrases that come just after neither and just after nor are similar. This exercise can promote students' reading comprehension by helping them:

• distinguish between explicit and implied main ideas

•  apply literal comprehension skills

• identify cause-and-effect relationships

•  recognize parallel grammatical structures

A middle school teacher designs an instructional activity in which students combine several sentences to form a single sentence, as illustrated below. 

Combine: 

Matthew stood and waited for the bus. The sun was blazing hot. Matthew fanned himself with the newspaper. 

Single sentence: Waiting for the bus, Matthew stood in the blazing sun, fanning himself with the newspaper. 

This activity is likely to be most effective in helping students:

•  strengthen their ability to comprehend and write complex sentences

• apply literal comprehension skills to identify and write main idea statements

•  improve their inferential comprehension skills

•  use self-monitoring techniques to clarify the meaning of text

Structural analysis would be the most appropriate strategy for a student to use to determine the meaning of which of the following words?

•  Impassable

• Elephant

• Interim

• Examine

To promote students' comprehension of a passage about comets and meteoroids, a middle school teacher shows the students how to use facts from the text to complete the following Venn diagram. This comprehension strategy is most effective in facilitating students' ability to:

• use inferential comprehension skills to identify cause-and-effect relationships

• draw on their prior knowledge to clarify understanding

• organize textual information according to similarities and differences

• apply their vocabulary knowledge in new contexts