FoRT Review 36-45

A group of third-grade students reads a poem aloud accurately but without much expression. Before asking the students text-dependent questions about the poem's content, the teacher spends time focusing on phrase-cueing. For example, the teacher asks the students to "Read the phrase that tells us ________" or "Identify the phrase that describes ________". After focusing on key phrases, the teacher conducts an expressive oral reading of the poem, focusing on proper pausing and expression, especially with respect to the phrases they discussed. Finally, the teacher leads the students in an expressive choral reading of the poem. Engaging the students in these activities prior to discussing the meaning of the poem demonstrates the teacher's understanding of:

• A. the concept that poetry must be read aloud in order for readers to fully appreciate it.

• B. the importance of accuracy as the foundation of reading fluency and comprehension

• C. the role of fluency as a bridge between simply decoding a text and comprehending it

• D. the interrelationships between the three key indicators of oral reading fluency

A second-grade teacher pairs students with appropriate, accessible texts for a paired-reading activity. During the activity, two students sit side by side and take turns reading an entire short text aloud. Over a period of several days, the pairs of students read and reread a large number of accessible texts together. This activity best promotes students' development of:

• A. reading rate and automaticity

• B. prosodic reading skills

• C. comprehension skills and strategies

• D. new phonics skills

A first-grade teacher would like to promote students' development of accurate decoding to support their oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher could most effectively promote first graders' accuracy by teaching them how to:

• A. use semantic and syntactic context clues in a text for word identification.

• B. apply phonics skills and knowledge of common syllable types and inflections to read words.

• C. memorize sets of grade-level words posted on classroom word walls by theme.

• D. sound out the first letter of a word and then guess the word based on a text's illustrations

By halfway through the school year, a majority of students in the class are making good progress reading the poems with fluency. However, a handful of students still read the poems haltingly, word by word, and ignore punctuation. Which of the following explicit, evidenced-based strategies would best transition the students away from word-by-word reading during the daily poetry activity?

• A. shifting the students from poetry to a broader range of narrative and informational texts

• B. establishing a weekly poetry performance to motivate the students to read with more expression

• C. building the students' background knowledge with respect to each poem's theme and literary device

• D. adding phrase-cues to the students' poetry booklets and modeling how to read aloud in phrases

The teacher has arranged for various adult volunteers to participate during the morning "fluency warm-up." According to evidence-based instruction, the teacher could best use the volunteers to support students' development of prosody by:

• A. providing the volunteers with unfamiliar poems for individual students to practice reading aloud "cold" to a volunteer.

• B. having the volunteers time individual students' oral reading and then show the students how to record and track their own fluency data on a weekly basis.

• C. showing the volunteers how to model appropriate oral reading of a target poem and engage students in echo reading.

• D. asking the volunteers to monitor pairs of students to make sure both students are practicing a target poem and reminding them to take turns, if needed.

A first-grade teacher creates poetry booklets for students to read each day as a morning "warm-up" activity to begin supporting their development of reading fluency. The teacher sequences the poems in the booklets according to phonics patterns and high-frequency words that students have recently learned. At the beginning of each week, the teacher works with small groups of students to ensure that they can read their new poem-of-the-week accurately. For the rest of the week, students practice reading the new poem with a classmate from their group. They also practice reading aloud other poems in the fluency warm-up booklet that they have previously learned. Which of the following rationales best describes the advantage of using poems for fluency practice?

• A. Poems frequently have predictable structures to support phonics development.

• B. Poetry resources are typically abundant in most classroom libraries.

• C. Poetry is meant to be read aloud and reread many times to construct meaning.

• D. Poems can be found in many lengths and address many topics.

A third-grade teacher observes that students who can read aloud fluently also demonstrate greater comprehension of expository texts. The best explanation for this is that fluent readers:

• A. possess a self-awareness that allows them to use metacognitive skills efficiently.

• B. have already developed the base of background knowledge typically covered by textbooks.

• C. have well-developed skills for decoding any level of text word by word.

• D. are able to focus their full attention and cognitive resources on the meaning of a text.

A third-grade teacher has students work on their oral reading fluency each day using a repeatedreading approach. Students work with a classmate to take turns reading an assigned grade-level text and timing each other's oral reading fluency rate. Some students in the class are currently participating in Tier 2 interventions to address identified gaps in grade-level decoding skills. The teacher differentiates the repeated-reading activity for these students by selecting texts that are aligned with the decoding skills they have been studying. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following additional modifications to the activity should the teacher make in order to improve the students' oral reading performance with their assigned text?

• A. providing the individual students with explicit teacher feedback with respect to their reading accuracy and prosody between readings

• B. increasing the amount of time the students spend daily engaged in the repeated oral reading activity by having them read the text ten times

• C. reminding the students to look at the pictures for clues whenever they do not immediately recognize a word in the assigned text

• D. having the students engage in silent reading practice instead of participating in the oral reading activity

. An entering second-grade student performs well below benchmarks on the universal screening for oral reading fluency. These results are aligned with the teacher's observation that the student does not read with fluency when reading aloud during daily reading activities. At this stage of reading development, the factor that is most likely disrupting the student's reading fluency is that the student does not:

• A. have the phonics knowledge and skills needed to decode the words in the texts

• B. know the meaning of most of the vocabulary words that appear in the texts

• C. know how to deconstruct the complex language structures used in the texts.

• D. have sufficient background knowledge related to the texts' topics

A second-grade teacher is working with a small group of students to improve their oral reading fluency. As part of lesson planning, the teacher analyzes the students' oral reading errors and plans instruction to address phonics knowledge and skills not yet mastered. The teacher's actions are likely to benefit the students' reading fluency most directly by:

• A. encouraging the students to slow down and decode words letter by letter, a prerequisite of fluent oral reading

• B. improving the students' reading accuracy, a key component of fluency

• C. promoting the students' recall of a large number of grade-level words by sight, a prerequisite of fluent oral reading

• D. focusing the students on increasing their reading rate, a key component of fluency.