Foundations of Reading

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

• divide written words into onsets and rimes.

• recognize and understand sight words in a text.

• guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from their context.

• use knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to decode words.

A teacher holds up a series of familiar objects, asking students to name each object and isolate the final sound they hear. This type of activity would be most appropriate for a student who:

• needs help developing phonemic segmentation skills.

• is performing below grade-level benchmarks in reading fluency

• lacks automaticity in word recognition

• has difficulty sounding out phonetically regular one-syllable words

Which of the following first-grade students has attained the highest level of phonemic awareness?

• a student who, after hearing the word hot and the sound /i/, can substitute /i/ for /o/ to make the word hit

• a student who can orally segment the word wonderful into won-der-ful

• a student who, after hearing the words fish and fun, can identify that they both begin with the same phoneme, /f/

• a student who can orally segment the word train into its onset and rime

Asking students to listen to a word (e.g., same) and then tell the teacher all the sounds in the word is an exercise that would be most appropriate for students who:

• have a relatively low level of phonological awareness

• are beginning to develop systematic phonics skills

• have a relatively high level of phonemic awareness

• are beginning to master the alphabetic principle

A kindergarten teacher asks a small group of students to repeat after her. First, she says the word grape and then pronounces it as gr and ape. Next, she says the word take and then pronounces it as tand ake. This activity is likely to promote the students' phonemic awareness primarily by:

• helping them recognize distinct syllables in oral language

• encouraging them to divide words into onsets and rimes

• teaching them how to distinguish between consonants and vowels

• promoting their awareness of letter- sound correspondence

A teacher shows a student pictures of familiar objects. As the teacher points to the first picture, she asks the student to name the object in the picture. Next, she asks the student to count on his fingers the number of sounds he makes as he says the word again. This activity is most likely to promote which of the following?

• understanding of the alphabetic principle

• phonemic awareness skills

• development of letter-sound correspondence

• word identification skills

A beginning-level English Language Learner can consistently blend individual phonemes to make simple English words composed of two or three phonemes but is having difficulty blending the sounds of familiar single-syllable words composed of four phonemes (e.g., clip, trap, spin). Which of the following questions would be most important for the first-grade teacher to consider when addressing the needs of this student?

• Are the target words in the student's oral vocabulary in English?

• Can the student distinguish between short and long vowel sounds in English?

• Can the student distinguish between short and long vowel sounds in English?

• Does the student's primary language have consonant blends?

A second-grade teacher has students pull two single-syllable nouns from a hat (e.g., bulb, light) and asks them to form words by putting the words together (e.g., lightbulb). Students then draw pictures to illustrate their new words and write short stories using the new words. This activity is likely to be most effective for helping students:

• use visualization as a reading comprehension strategy

• apply knowledge of phonics generalizations

• use context clues to identify unfamiliar words

• understand the concept of compound words

A third-grade teacher administers the following informal reading assessment to individual students. Part 1: Read aloud the following words: laugh - neighbor - beginning - friend - together - young. Part 2: Read aloud the following passage: Nick and Ben are best friends. They have been neighbors since they were very young. In the beginning, they did not get along, but now they play together every day after school. They make jokes and laugh a lot. One student performs significantly better on the second part of the test than on the first. Which of the following is the best assessment of this student's reading performance?

• The student is proficient at using context clues to help identify words but has weak word decoding skills

• The student can decode single- syllable words but has not yet learned how to decode multisyllable words

• The student is proficient at using syntactic clues to identify words but is not yet skilled at using semantic clues

• The student understands letter- sound correspondence but has limited awareness of syllable structure

A second-grade teacher uses the following handout to guide the class through an activity. . Look at the word fair in these two sentences: - It isn't fair that Juan got an extra scoop of ice cream. - Simon and Ling went to the fair and rode on the merry-go-round. How are these words the same? How are they different? Can you think of sentences that show two different ways in which each of the following words can be used? saw, spell, root, run, play, fly, kind, seal

• use structural clues to identify the meaning of words

• identify and decode common homographs

• cluster new vocabulary together into meaningful groups

• find and use synonyms for common words