I-1. 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.

I-2. 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

I-3. 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/

I-4. 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

I-11. A fourth-grade student who reads on grade level and consistently performs well on spelling tests that are part of weekly word study activities often misspells the same words, and other familiar words, in everyday writings. The following table shows examples of typical errors the student makes on class writing assignments and in informal notes to friends.

The student's overall spelling performance suggests that the student would benefit most from a targeted intervention focused on which of the following foundational skills?

• applying common orthographic rules to inflected words

• sounding out and blending letter-sounds to decode a word

• discriminating between consonant and vowel sounds in words

• segmenting all the phonemes in a word sequentially

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

II-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

II-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

II-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.

II-24. Which of the following principles is best illustrated by the words watched, wanted, and warned?

• Spelling is often the best predictor of the pronunciation of a suffix.

• Open syllables are usually pronounced with a long vowel sound.

• The spelling of a suffix is often more reliable than its pronunciation.

• The second letter of a consonant blend is usually pronounced as the onset of the following syllable.