Foundations of Reading 2

Question 1

A second-grade teacher frequently conducts spelling inquiry workshops with students to deepen their understanding of various orthographic guidelines. For example, in one inquiry, the teacher gives students a set of words that follow the silent-e syllable pattern and that include the inflectional ending -ing, -ed, or -s. Students work with a classmate to sort the base words according to whether the word drops the silent e when adding the inflection. After sorting the words, the students must analyze each list to generate a rule describing the conditions that require an e-drop. The following is a completed chart by one pair of students.

What is the rule for dropping silent e?
Inflected words WITH an e-drop
shaking shared smiling
staring biked joked
baking hoped living
Inflected words WITHOUT an e-drop
shakes shares smiles
stares bikes jokes
bakes hopes lives

Some pairs of students, such as the pair whose work is shown, correctly sort the words, but they still cannot generate an orthographic rule for when to drop the silent e. The teacher could best support these students by prompting them to:

Answer 1

examine the consonant/vowel patterns of the base words and suffixes on both sides of the chart.

Question 2

A second-grade teacher wants to ensure that students become automatic in recognizing the orthographic patterns they are explicitly taught during decoding instruction. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following instructional strategies best promotes students’ automatic recognition of a new orthographic pattern to support proficient reading?

Answer 2

providing practice with phoneme-grapheme mapping and various reading and spelling activities that focus on words containing the new orthographic pattern

Question 3

Which of the following instructional strategies would be most effective in promoting students’ decoding of multisyllable words that are not multimorphemic?

Answer 3

teaching students how to divide multisyllable words into syllables according to common syllable types

Question 4

A teacher is working with a group of learners who exhibit the following characteristics.
* The students can accurately read single-syllable words that feature closed, open, and silent-e syllables; and vowel-team syllables that make a long-vowel sound.
* The students can accurately read multisyllable words that feature closed and open syllables.
Which of the following sets of words includes appropriate types of syllables to provide the students with practice applying their knowledge of syllable types to read decodable multisyllable words?

Answer 4

reveal, combine, explain

Question 5

A group of first-grade students has mastered reading single-syllable words that follow the closed- syllable patterns VC, CVC, CVCC, and CCVC. The teacher would like to expand students’ reading development by teaching them how to read two-syllable words that consist of closed syllables, such as picnic, muffin, trumpet, pretzel, invent, and frantic. The teacher could best promote the students’ accurate, efficient reading of this type of word by teaching them to use which of the following decoding strategies?

Answer 5

Look at the vowels in a target word; if they are separated by two consonants, divide the word between the consonants (e.g., muf/fin), and then read each syllable from left to right.

Question 6

A fourth-grade student tries to decode the word accumulate in a science article by using syllabication skills. In order to read the individual syllables of the word after dividing them correctly, the student would need to be proficient in decoding which of the following syllable types?

Answer 6

closed, open, silent e

Question 7

A teacher poses the following question to fourth-grade students.
What words can you think of that have the word “act” in them?
Using student responses, the teacher creates the following web on the board.
*Web picture of “act” in the middle with arrows to sections of words like: acted, react, playact, inactive.

This technique is likely to be most helpful for enhancing the students’ awareness of:

Answer 7

morphemic structure

Question 8

A third-grade teacher uses word matrices as a strategy for teaching structural or morphemic analysis skills. The teacher models for students how to create and use a word matrix to generate related words by combining a base word or root with one or more affixes. Following is a word matrix for the base word move.
[re, un - move - s, ing, ed, er, ment]

The teacher supports students in generating the following list of words using this matrix: moves, moving, moved, mover, movement, movements, remove, removes, removing, removed, remover, unmoving, and unmoved.
Which of the following words that the students generated contains a derivational suffix?

Answer 8

mover

Question 9

A third-grade teacher uses word matrices as a strategy for teaching structural or morphemic analysis skills. The teacher models for students how to create and use a word matrix to generate related words by combining a base word or root with one or more affixes. Following is a word matrix for the base word move.
[re, un - move - s, ing, ed, er, ment]

The teacher supports students in generating the following list of words using this matrix: moves, moving, moved, mover, movement, movements, remove, removes, removing, removed, remover, unmoving, and unmoved.

Two students in the class with a learning disability are successful in generating multimorphemic words when presented with a familiar base word and a simple suffix (e.g., -s, -ed). However, when presented with a familiar prefix, base word or root, and suffix, they cannot generate any new words, with or without the support of the matrix. Which of the following strategies for differentiating the lesson would be most appropriate for supporting the students’ development in structural or morphemic analysis?

Answer 9

having the students begin with a two-box matrix using a few common inflections and then gradually introducing one new derivational affix at a time and explaining how each affix changes the meaning of the base word

Question 10

Which of the following statements best describes the relationship between word decoding and reading comprehension in a beginning reader’s development?

Answer 10

Decoding skills are essential for the development of reading fluency to support reading comprehension.

Question 11

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:

Answer 11

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

Question 12

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:

Answer 12

improving the students’ reading accuracy, a key component of fluency.

Question 13

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:

Answer 13

reading rate and automaticity.

Question 14

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:

Answer 14

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

Question 15

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:

Answer 15

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

Question 16

A third-grade teacher has students work on their oral reading fluency each day using a repeated- reading 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?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

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:

Answer 17

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

Question 18

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?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

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.

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:

Answer 19

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

Question 20

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?

Answer 20

adding phrase-cues to the students’ poetry booklets and modeling how to read aloud in phrases

Question 21

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?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

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:

Answer 22

promoting their oral language development and listening comprehension.

Question 23

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?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

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?

Answer 24

words that are conceptually challenging

Question 25

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:

Answer 25

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