CTEL 1: Language and Language Subtest Structure

A group of elementary beginning-level English learners has difficulty pronouncing a particular English phoneme. Which of the following strategies is likely to be the most effective first step in addressing the students’ difficulty?

• Using meaningful minimal pair activities, such as rhyming words in poems and songs, to develop the students’ ability to identify and produce the phoneme in the context of whole words

• Using an illustration or model of a human mouth to point out to the students the specific parts of the mouth and point of articulation involved in producing the phoneme

• Reading aloud meaningful connected discourse, such as dialogues and stories that contain instances of the phoneme, to expose the students implicitly to the phoneme in the context of whole paragraphs

• Repeating the phoneme several times while pointing to its corresponding letter(s) on an alphabet chart to prompt the students to associate the phoneme with its most common graphic representation(s)

Read the sentences below and answer the question that follows.

“We worked hard on the bake sale. To raise money for the class trip.”

Students in an early-advanced ELD class frequently make mistakes in their writing similar to that one underlined above. The first step the teacher should take in addressing this problem is to help the students learn how to do which of the following?

• Distinguish between coordinating conjunctions and correlative conjunction

• Distinguish between phrase fragments and complete sentences

• Distinguish between prepositional phrases and infinitive phrases

• Distinguish between gerund phrases acting as subjects and those acting as direct objects

A person may choose to use different variations of a language depending on the context of a discourse. Which of the following situations best illustrates this phenomenon?

• A person uses one set of vocabulary words and language structures when discussing a topic with friends but uses another set when discussing the same topic with colleagues

• A teacher who speaks both English and Spanish asks parents and guardians which language they would prefer to use during parent-teacher conferences

• An English learners uses double negatives when speaking or writing in English in class but constructs the negative currently when completing language exercises

• A person who grew up speaking a regional dialect moves to another part of the United States and continues to use the native dialect with which he or she is comfortable

Which of the following activities is likely to be most effective in helping high school English learners develop familiarity with standard discourse structures and conventions used in academic essays?

• Providing students with copies of essays that have key content-related vocabulary words omitted and asking the students to try to fill in the missing words

• Asking students to review samples of different types of essays and to identify the vocabulary and grammatical structures the samples have in common

• Helping students analyze sample essays and construct graphic organizers illustration the structure of different types of essays, which they can refer to when drafting their own essays

• Having a small group of students brainstorm a topic for an essay, after which each student writes a short draft of an essay that is analyzed by the rest of the group

In order to develop pragmatic competence as a writer, a student must pay most attention to which of the following?

• Lexical specificity

• Audience & purpose

• Syntactic complexity

• Structure and organization

Which of the following is the primary tenet of social-interactionist theories of language acquisition?

• Language learners need to be exposed to comprehensible input that is at a slightly higher level of difficulty than they can currently produce in the target language

• Language learners need a “silent period” to develop their receptive language skills in a target language before they can produce meaningful discourse

• Language learners acquire a target language over time by developing an interlanguage that increasingly resembles the target language

• Language learners need to have meaningful opportunities to negotiate meaning with others and to construct comprehensible output in the target language

Students in a 7th grade intermediate-level ELD class are giving oral reports. The teacher encourages the students in the audience to raise their hands during each presentation to ask the speaker to repeat or explain things that they do not understand. Participating in this ways helps promote competence primarily by:

• Helping them apply cognitive processes for synthesizing and internalizing language

• Ensuring that instruction is within their zones of proximal development

• Promoting their development of social language-learning strategies

• Enhancing their awareness of grammatical features of communication

A middle school class includes several early intermediate-level English learners. Which of the following activities is likely to be most effective in promoting their English language development by providing opportunities for comprehensive input and output?

• Students read explanations of how particular English sounds are made, listen to a recording of the sounds spoken by native English speakers, and then practice producing the sounds

• Students watch the teacher demonstrate a simple science experiment, work with a partner to conduct the experiment themselves, and then discuss their observations in small groups

• The teacher shows students a video about a social studies topic and gives a brief summary of the video in an oral presentation, and then students write in their personal dictionaries all the new vocabulary they learned

• The teacher explains a new grammatical structure to students and provides examples, the students restate the grammar rule in their own words, and then the students identify usage errors in short texts

Which of the following approaches to providing English learners with feedback is likely to be most effective in creating an environment that promotes their English language development?

• The teacher regularly points out students’ errors immediately and explicitly

• The teacher primarily provides feedback to those students whose language usage is most problematic

• The teacher regularly rephrases significant usage errors, ignoring random errors that do not affect a message’s comprehensibility

• The teacher primarily uses contrastive analysis when choosing what errors to correct, ignoring those errors that are not directly linked to primary language interference

A high school regularly sponsors and promotes multicultural events and activities. This factor is most likely to lead to which of the following outcomes for English learners in the school?

• It will tend to raise English learners’ self-esteem and thus facilitate their acquisition of English

• It will tend to increase cultural dissonance in the school among students from different cultural groups

• It will tend to lessen the likelihood that English learners will acculturate successfully in U.S. mainstream culture

• It will tend to expand English learners’ understanding of educational and career opportunities