Foundations of Reading: Objective V

46. A second-grade student demonstrates automaticity decoding grade-level regular and irregular words. However, the student frequently experiences poor text comprehension with informational texts. Which of the following steps should the teacher take first to promote the student's reading development?

• evaluating the student's ability to apply grade-level phonics and syllabication skills when reading the target texts

• determining the rate of the student's phonological processing when reading the target informational texts

• evaluating the degree to which the student uses syntactic clues when reading the target informational texts

• using questioning to determine the student's vocabulary and background knowledge with respect to the target texts

47. A first-grade teacher designs the following activity.

1. Divide students into pairs.

2. Have the two students sit back-to-back.

3. Give a student in each pair a picture of a familiar object to describe.

4. Have the second student try to name the object based on the description.

5. If the second student cannot determine the target object, instruct the student describing the object to use more precise language (e.g., describing the object's color, texture, size, use).

6. The student pairs switch roles and repeat steps 2–5.

This activity is likely to contribute to students' literacy development primarily by:

• showing them how to distinguish shades of meaning among words with similar denotations.

• developing their ability to categorize words according to their function.

• promoting their oral language development and listening comprehension.

• encouraging them to develop their oral presentation skills.

48. Students in a fourth-grade class read a text that includes the word indefensible, which is unfamiliar to some of them. Which of the following strategies for teaching the word would be most effective in both clarifying the meaning of the word and extending the students' understanding and use of an appropriate word-learning strategy?

• asking the students to paraphrase the sentence that contains the word by substituting a synonym for the word

• having the students enter the word in their ongoing list of new vocabulary words and then look up its definition independently

• modeling for the students how to apply knowledge of morphology to construct the word's meaning and use context to confirm it

• using print and digital reference materials to explain the word's meaning to the students before they read the text

49. A fifth-grade teacher is about to begin a new unit on ecosystems, with an emphasis on the movement of matter among the various components of an ecosystem. Which of the following types of vocabulary words from the unit would be most appropriate for the teacher to pre-teach?

• words that are conceptually challenging

• high-frequency, phonetically irregular words

• high-frequency words that have multiple meanings

• multisyllable words made of two or more syllable types

50. A fifth-grade student reads the sentence, "After playing with her friends all day, Kaylee did her science homework, her geography project, and her English paper in one fell swoop." The student asks the teacher for support in understanding the meaning of the phrase one fell swoop. After explaining the phrase's meaning, the teacher could best deepen and extend the student's understanding of this idiomatic expression by:

• asking the student to find other sentences in the text that use the words fell and swoop.

• discussing with the student additional examples of the phrase used in context.

• directing the student to look up different meanings of fell and swoop in the dictionary.

• showing the student how to create a tree diagram of the structure of the phrase.

51. A sixth-grade teacher is planning explicit instruction to develop students' ability to read and understand sentences that have a complex sentence structure. Which of the following skills would be most effective for the teacher to focus on?

• distinguishing between complex sentences that use passive and active voice

• deconstructing complex sentences into independent and dependent clauses

• identifying common transition words that link ideas in two or more sentences

• distinguishing between demonstrative and indefinite pronouns in a sentence

52. Over the course of the school year, a sixth-grade student who had been a fluent, proficient reader in previous years has become increasingly inconsistent in comprehending grade-level literary and informational texts assigned in class. The results of informal, curriculum-based assessments indicate that the student still meets grade-level expectations in vocabulary knowledge, but the student's reading rate and comprehension have dropped below grade-level expectations. The teacher observes that the student does not read smoothly when reading aloud sentences that contain more than one clause, and the student often comments about "getting lost in the sentence." The teacher is also aware that the student tends to choose fiction and graphic novels for independent reading that are written well below grade-level expectations. The student's overall reading profile suggests that the student would likely benefit most from explicit instruction focused on promoting the student's:

• understanding of important features of skilled and prosodic oral reading.

• ability to deconstruct complex academic language and interpret its meaning.

• skill in applying contextual analysis and other word analysis strategies.

• development of automaticity recognizing grade-level high-frequency words.

53. A third-grade class that includes several English learners is preparing to read a text about the life cycles of various organisms (e.g., plants, mammals, reptiles). Which of the following teaching strategies would be most effective in promoting the English learners' comprehension of the text?

• having the students look up unknown English words using bilingual dictionaries and then make vocabulary lists in both languages

• pairing English learners with students whose home language is English and asking the latter to explain any unknown vocabulary

• activating the students' prior knowledge about the topic and providing visual aids such as illustrations to clarify new vocabulary

• giving the students a list of new vocabulary with definitions and having them try to construct original sentences using the words

54. A sixth-grade student encounters the following sentence in a short story.

"She experienced a sense of déjà vu as she walked down the street of the strange new city."

The student asks the teacher about the meaning of déjà vu in the sentence. The teacher could best respond by advising the student to take which of the following steps?

• making note of the word in a vocabulary log, and then studying the word after finishing the story

• using context clues in the sentence to guess the meaning of the word, and then trying out that meaning in the sentence

• looking up the word in the dictionary, and then paraphrasing the sentence using the dictionary definition

• breaking the word into its component parts, and then comparing the parts to the meanings of similar known words

55. Before beginning a new content-area reading passage, a fourth-grade teacher asks students to think of words related to the topic of the text. The teacher writes the words on the board and then asks the students to suggest ways to group the words based on meaningful connections. The teacher also encourages them to explain their reasons for grouping particular words together. This series of activities is likely to promote the students' reading development primarily by helping them:

• extend and reinforce their expressive and receptive vocabularies related to the text's topic.

• infer the meaning of new vocabulary in the text based on word derivations.

• strengthen and extend their understanding of the overall structure of the text.

• verify word meanings in the text by incorporating syntactic and semantic clues into their word analysis.