Foundations of Reading - Objective I

As students begin to read, the ability to blend phonemes orally contributes to their reading development primarily because it prepares students to:

• recognize high-frequency words in a text automatically.

• combine letter-sounds to decode words.

• guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from their context.

• divide written words into onsets and rimes.

A teacher is selecting words to use to assess students' ability to segment the individual phonemes in spoken words. Which of the following words would require the highest level of skill with regard to orally segmenting phonemes?

• stamp

• catch

• fudge

• chase

Which of the following tasks requires the most advanced level of skill along the phonological awareness continuum?

• orally segmenting the phonemes in the word chimp and then substituting /ŏ/ for /ĭ/ to make a new word, chomp

• orally segmenting the word wonderful into won/der/ful and then tapping the number of syllables in the word

• listening to the words place and pluck and then orally segmenting each word into its onset and rime

• listening to the words fiddle and fresh and then determining that both words begin with the same phoneme, /f/

A kindergarten teacher engages a small group of children in the following Say It and Move It activity.

-The teacher says a two-phoneme word slowly (e.g., ape, bee, day, eat, go, she, toe).

-The children slowly repeat the word.

-The children move a plain wooden block as they say each phoneme, lining up the two blocks from left to right.

Once the children demonstrate mastery of this activity, which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use next to build the children's phonemic awareness?

• writing pairs of words on the board that differ by one phoneme (e.g., ape, cape) and pointing out to the children that the second word contains more phonemes than the first

• exchanging the plain blocks for alphabet letter blocks and then helping the children do the Say It and Move It activity with relevant letter blocks, using pairs of words that have two and three phonemes (e.g., go, goat)

• saying a pair of words that differ by one phoneme (e.g., bee, beach) and encouraging the children to generate pairs of words that rhyme with the target words (e.g., tea, teach)

• displaying pictures for a pair of two- and three-phoneme words that differ by a single phoneme (e.g., toe, toad) and having the children complete the Say It and Move It activity for each word in the pair

In which line in the table is a word accurately matched to the number of phonemes the word contains?

• Line 1

• Line 2

• Line 3

• Line 4

A prekindergarten teacher asks a small group of children to listen to and repeat what the teacher says. First, the teacher says the word mop and then pronounces it as /m/ and [ŏp]. Next, the teacher says the word take and then pronounces it as /t/ and [āk]. This activity is likely to promote the children's phonological awareness primarily by:

• modeling how to separate the syllables in spoken words.

• showing them how to segment words into onsets and rimes.

• promoting their awareness of each phoneme in a spoken word.

• teaching them how to distinguish between consonants and vowels.

A prekindergarten teacher is reading a storybook to the class so that the children can see the words and pictures while the teacher points to the line of print. This activity best contributes to the children's emergent reading development primarily by:

• promoting their development of letter-recognition skills.

• helping them recognize the function of spaces between words.

• developing their awareness of left-to-right directionality.

• promoting their understanding of letter-sound correspondence.

Having kindergarten children practice tracing the letters of the alphabet in sand is most appropriate for children who need additional support in:

• internalizing the alphabetic principle and letter-sound correspondences.

• recognizing that print carries meaning.

• understanding the relationship between spoken and written language.

• developing letter-formation skills.

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

• The children's grasp of the alphabetic principle will be reinforced as they apply phonetic spelling.

• The children may become frustrated by the difficulty of the English spelling system and lose interest in writing.

• Because of the reciprocity between decoding and encoding, the children's reading progress may be adversely affected by any uncorrected spelling errors.

• The children will tend to develop automatic word-recognition skills by engaging in spelling practice.

A kindergarten teacher is reading a big book to a group of children. The teacher periodically points to the beginning consonant of selected words and accentuates its initial phoneme as the teacher reads the word aloud. The teacher's practice is most likely to reinforce the children's:

• awareness of word boundaries in text.

• awareness of letter-sound correspondences.

• ability to segment the sounds of spoken words.

• ability to apply phonemic blending skills.