Foundations of Reading: Objective II

14. Several children in a kindergarten class have mastered orally blending sets of spoken sounds together to make words. Which of the following additional skills demonstrated by the children would best indicate that they are ready to begin instruction in decoding simple words?

• identifying key parts of a book consistently, such as the front, back, and title, when prompted by the teacher and pointing to the first page

• tracking print directionality with a pointer on a big book of a predictable text after the teacher models reading and tracking the text

• identifying letter-sound correspondences consistently for several high-utility letters, such as a, m, t, and s, when prompted by the teacher

• recalling the letters of the alphabet in sequence when prompted by the teacher using an alphabet banner and the alphabet song

15. Which of the following statements provides the best rationale for incorporating spelling instruction into a first-grade reading program?

• Spelling instruction promotes phonological sensitivity by teaching students to break words into onsets and rimes and recognize common phonograms.

• Spelling instruction streamlines the reading process by focusing on a finite set of orthographic guidelines, which accelerates students' reading development.

• Spelling instruction facilitates students' vocabulary development by introducing them to new grade-level academic words throughout the school year.

• Spelling instruction reinforces students' knowledge of phonics patterns, which supports their development of automaticity and ability to construct meaning while reading.

16. In the years since the report by the National Reading Panel (2000) was published, evidence- based research has conclusively documented that which of the following phonics approaches is most effective in promoting beginning readers' reading and spelling development?

• teaching students common phonograms or word families that share the same orthographic rime (i.e., ending letter sequence with a common pronunciation)

• introducing students to printed words that are likely to be in their oral vocabularies to support them in making effective guesses based on a text's context (e.g., the pictures)

• providing embedded phonics or "phonics in context," in which the teacher primarily offers support reading a word when a student cannot read a word in connected text

• focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, in which students are taught explicitly to sound out each letter or letter combination in a word and blend the letter-sounds together

17. Which of the following sentences contains a pair of italicized words that differ from each other by one phoneme?

• He took off his cap before he lay down to take a nap.

• She walked down the lane to see the beautiful deep blue sea.

• They were distracted by the noise as the window shade retracted.

• After he bashed his toe, he sat down for a while and basked in the sun.

18. In which line in the table is the underlined portion of an example word accurately matched to the term that is used to describe that phonics element?

• Line 1

• Line 2

• Line 3

• Line 4

19. A second-grade teacher divides the class into small groups and provides a copy of the following instructions to each group. Students work collaboratively to complete the activity. Afterward, each group shares their results with the whole class during a teacher-led discussion. The activity and related discussion would best promote students' ability to:

• use semantic and syntactic clues to identify the meaning and pronunciation of homographs.

• apply structural clues to decode and identify the meaning of printed words.

• find and use synonyms for common words to expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies.

• associate related vocabulary words and sort them into meaningful groups.

20. A second-grade teacher regularly reviews spelling patterns previously taught. The teacher also provides students with multiple opportunities to read and write connected text that features words containing the spelling patterns and to engage in word sorts comparing new and previously taught spelling patterns. These types of instructional activities are likely to promote students' reading skills primarily by developing their:

• skill in identifying and categorizing common word families by their rimes.

• accuracy and automaticity reading words that follow the target phonics patterns.

• automatic recognition of and fluency reading texts containing high-frequency words.

• knowledge of the meaning and usage of common, grade-level vocabulary words.

21. A first-grade teacher periodically administers spelling surveys to help assess students' phonics knowledge. The following tables show one student's performance on a spelling survey midway through the school year and again two months later. The student's performance on the second administration of the spelling survey indicates that the student has progressed with respect to which of the following phonics elements?

• initial and final consonants

• long-vowel teams and diphthongs

• consonant digraphs and blends

• silent e and r-controlled vowels

22. A third-grade teacher is planning differentiated reading instruction for an entering-level English learner who has grade-level reading skills in a language that uses the Roman alphabet. The teacher could best accelerate the student's progress in reading English by using which of the following approaches?

• providing instruction to promote the student's development of the alphabetic principle by drawing explicit connections between oral and written language

• supporting the student in identifying consonant sounds that both languages have in common while systematically teaching common English syllable types to introduce English vowel patterns and pronunciations

• introducing systematic, explicit phonics skills to the student by showing the student how to sound out and blend the letter-sounds in simple English words

• modeling how to use textual and graphic context clues to decode unfamiliar words in texts while providing the student with predictable, illustrated texts to use in practicing context as a word-identification strategy

23. According to basic principles of evidence-based, systematic phonics instruction, which of the following common English letter combinations would be most appropriate for a first-grade teacher to introduce first?

• ir

• kn

• th

• oi