RICA Subtest 2

1. What is a teacher's best strategy to encourage students to read new kinds of books so that they continue to extend their language development?

• allow the student to continue reading they books they enjoy and understand that language development will come with time

• provide the student with books on the same or similar topics that they already enjoy that are at a more challenging level

• tell the student why reading the same kinds of book is bad for them

• let the student know that if she doesn't read harder books now, school will become too hard for them in the future

Answer explanation

In this case, use the I + I strategy, which takes the student's interest in combination with the student's independent reading level and help the student find books that stretch their reading development. Here the best solution is the second answer.

2. For students who struggle to read because of having a limited vocabulary set, a teacher needs to provide instructional intervention so that the student:

• can learn to love reading

• won't be forced to be able to only use audio books in school

• doesn't stay at the same grade level they are at indefinitely

• doesn't continue to fall behind peers in reading development in later grades

Answer explanation

The problem with students who struggle to read in early years is that if they do not receive reading intervention, they will continue to fall further behind grade level as time moves forward. The best answer here is the last solution.

3. Teaching students to realize the meaning of a word by looking at the word's context, or the other words around it, is important; however, we cannot solely rely on contextual clues because:

• using context clues don't play a significant role for students who have already acquired the necessary background knowledge about the topic

• English words often carry different meanings, so it's best to look up words we don't know in the dictionary

• explicit context clues often don't exist in real-world, higher level books and implicit clues require students to apply background knowledge about the topic that they may lack

• new words should always be learned in isolation before in context

Answer explanation

A teacher needs to teach students who to study a word through its context; however, we teachers must also show students that we cannot rely on understanding a word's meaning solely through its context because oftentimes understanding the meaning requires a student to have pre-learned a certain amount of background knowledge related to that topic. Therefore, the best solution here is the 3rd choice.

4. Designing cross-curricular units with multidisciplinary skills best promotes students' reading development through:

• individualized student topic, response and practice

• improving students' oral and written English skills

• helping to motivate all kind of students to learn more

• integrating different kinds of books that promote new vocabulary learning

Answer explanation

Cross-curricular units levels up students' reading development through its natural use of using different kinds and sources of books, where the students are exposed to new writing styles and vocabulary sets. The best answer here is the fourth choice.

5. Teaching morphemes promotes students' vocabulary development mostly by helping the students:

changeable - lovable - ABLE - usable - adaptable

• recognize the difference between a root word and an affix

• apply graphic organizer knowledge to increase vocabulary understanding

• use word roots they already know to build their vocabulary

• pronounce new words more accurately, faster

6. To check for student's vocabulary understanding, we will use student's reading levels and insert blanks in the text where nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs used to be and allow the students to write appropriate words to fill in the blanks. This assessment mostly requires the students to:

• create definitions to appropriately fill in the blanks

• apply their understanding of grammar and vocabulary to correctly fill in the blanks

• categorize words based on meaning to correctly fill in the blanks

• identify the grammar points of the sentences to write the correct vocabulary inside the blanks

Answer explanation

The activity in the problem allows teachers to gage students' understanding of grammar and vocabulary to correctly fill in the blanks. The best solution is the second choice.

7. Providing a group of middle school students the following sentence with the two red underlines gives students' the chance to:

What you see is what you get.

• Find a better way to create an introductory hook

• apply reading comprehension skills

• identify the main idea of the sentence

• recognize a type of grammatical structure

Answer explanation

This sentence would be a great example to show a group of English learners the parallel grammatical structure we often use in English. The best answer here is the fourth solution.

8. A middle school teacher creates an activity where students will be tasked to combine two sentences into a single sentence. This instructional activity will mostly help students:

• write complex sentences

• identify the main idea of a passage

• categorize different grammatical structures

• find the appropriate meaning of a complex sentence

Answer explanation

In this activity, the students combine multiple sentences to form one single sentence. Looking at the first solution, to write a complex sentence, let's recall that a complex sentence is formed by adding one or more subordinate clauses to the main independent clause, and that's what's happening here, so the first choice is best.

9. Using structural analysis would be the best strategy to decode the meaning of which of the following:*

1/1

• unreadable

• giraffe

• cup

• determine

10. Teachers promote using a Venn diagram graphic organizer to aid students' reading comprehension mostly to:

• help students pick out the story elements of a story

• help students write alternative endings to stories

• help students organize the similarities and differences of the information they read

• help students identify and recall challenging vocabulary terms from the text