Multiple Choice
A preschool teacher is reading a story to his class. As he reads, he holds the book so the children can see the words and pictures while his finger follows the line of print. This activity would contribute to the children's reading development primarily by: Select one: A. helping them recognize phonemes that occur frequently in print. B. promoting their development of letter recognition skills. C. developing their awareness of left-to- right directionality. D. promoting their understanding of letter-sound correspondence.
c. By following the line of print with his finger while reading, the teacher provides students with a visual demonstration that print is read from left to right.
The words enjoyable, maneuverable, corruptible, and convertible best illustrate which of the following principles? Select one: A. The pronunciation of a suffix can change when added to certain root words. B. The addition of a suffix can alter the spelling of its root word. C. The spelling of a suffix can vary depending on its root word. D. The accented syllable of a root word can shift when certain suffixes are added to it.
c. The four words presented contain the same derivational suffix, which has two variant spellings, -able and -ible. The correct spelling of the suffix in a particular word depends on the root of the word.
A second-grade teacher reads a trade book aloud to the class. Which of the following postreading activities would be most likely to promote the students' comprehension of the story by enhancing their literary analysis skills? Select one: A. helping the students make a concept map of the main events of the story B. having the students "freewrite" about the story in their journals C. asking the students to reread the story silently and respond to literal comprehension questions D. encouraging the students to identify the key vocabulary words in the story
A. A concept or story map is a strategy for visually organizing key elements of a story such as characters, setting, and main events. At the second-grade level, literary analysis involves learning how to retell a main event from a story heard or read and to ask questions about important characters, settings, and events in a story. Creating a concept map of the main events of a story would help promote each of these literary analysis skills.
A fifth-grade class is about to read a play about the life of Harriet Tubman called "Travels on the Railroad." Which of the following prereading activities would best promote students' comprehension of the text? A. asking students to share what they already know about Harriet Tubman and the time period during which she lived B. asking students to predict what will happen in the first act based on the play's title and on a list of the play's main characters C. encouraging small groups of students to create and perform their own short skits about the same subject D. introducing the common elements of plays as a genre and looking at sections of a printed play together as a class
A. Activating students' prior knowledge related to a text is one of the most powerful strategies for promoting their comprehension of the text.
After reading a historical novel about the U.S. Civil War, students in a sixth-grade class each bring in an object that, to them, represents the book. The students share the different objects and discuss ways in which each object might represent the book. This activity is most likely to promote students' reading development by helping them: Select one: A. create personal interpretations about the book. B. determine the author's main point of view. C. analyze the author's use of figurative language. D. understand the plot structure and overall chronology of the book.
A. By asking students to select an object that represents the book to them and discuss ways in which the object represents the book, the teacher prompts the students to think about what ideas or feelings the book evoked in them as they read.
A sixth-grade class is working on an Internet research project about various natural resources and their uses. The teacher could best support students' effective use of the Internet for their research by: A. providing students with a checklist of questions that prompt critical evaluation of information on Web sites. B. encouraging students to search for Web sites that are easy to navigate and that contain familiar vocabulary. C. giving students a list of Websites that have been pre-approved based on the sites' reading levels. D. teaching students to employ a variety of search engines to locate relevant Web sites.
A. Determining whether a given Website contains reliable information is an important step in conducting research on the Internet. Having students question the validity of content they read on a Web site will build this skill, promoting their ability to conduct more effective and bias-free research.
A fifth-grade class is about to begin reading a text about the European exploration of North America. Before they begin, the teacher has the students brainstorm what they already know about the topic. After reading the text, she encourages them to share any additional information that they may have thought of as they were reading. These activities are likely to promote the students' comprehension primarily by: A. encouraging them to connect new information to prior knowledge of the topic. B. encouraging them to use context cues to make appropriate inferences. C. helping them analyze the text in terms of main ideas and supporting details. D. helping them determine the author's purpose and point of view.
A. Having students brainstorm what they already know about a topic prior to reading a text helps them activate schema that will support their comprehension of the text. Afterward, encouraging students to identify and discuss additional information they have gained through reading the text helps them connect prior learning to new knowledge, which both deepens and broadens their schema related to the topic.
Pointing out the title, beginning, middle, and end of a book to a group of preschool children before reading the book aloud to them contributes to their reading development primarily by promoting their: Select one: A. development of book-handling skills. B. understanding of the concept of schema. C. development of literal comprehension strategies. D. understanding of text directionality.
A. The instruction the teacher provides before reading aloud, in conjunction with how the teacher holds and proceeds through the book during reading, helps beginning readers learn how to hold a book with the front cover facing up and the spine on the left, and then how to move through the pages from front to back.
A teacher can most effectively support first graders' development of rapid automatic word recognition by first teaching students how to: Select one: A. apply consistent phonics generalizations in common words. B. identify the constituent parts of multisyllable words. C. look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. D. use context cues to determine the meanings of words.
A. Automaticity is the rapid recognition of a word without conscious attention to the decoding process. Research indicates that accurate decoding skills are a prerequisite to the development of, and readiness to benefit from instruction in, automatic word recognition. Applying consistent phonics generalizations to decode common words is a foundational decoding skill appropriate for beginning readers at the first-grade level.
A fifth-grade teacher is about to begin a new unit on weather and climate. Which of the following types of vocabulary words from the unit would be most appropriate for the teacher to preteach? Select one: A. words that are conceptually challenging B. high-frequency, phonetically irregular words C. high-frequency words with multiple meanings D. multisyllable words
A. Conceptually challenging words, especially those associated with a new content-specific unit of study, are not likely to be in students' oral vocabularies, let alone in their reading vocabularies. To support students' reading comprehension of content-area texts associated with the unit, it is critical to introduce students to key concepts and associated vocabulary in both their oral and written forms prior to reading.
Instruction in structural analysis is likely to promote upper elementary students' reading comprehension primarily by: Select one: A. equipping them with strategies for understanding the meanings of unfamiliar multisyllable words. B. increasing their knowledge of key vocabulary found in content-area textbooks. C. facilitating their ability to use phonics generalizations to decode words. D. enhancing their familiarity with the text structures and features used in different genres.
A. In the context of reading, structural analysis is the process of recognizing the morphemic structure of words. Readers who recognize component morphemes (i.e., base words, prefixes, suffixes, and inflections) in unfamiliar, morphologically complex words can use this knowledge to support decoding or to derive the likely meaning of the words.
A fifth-grade student reads the sentence, "After playing with her friends all day, Kaylee did her science homework, her geography project, and her composition in one fell swoop." The student asks the teacher for help understanding what is meant by the phrase one fell swoop. The teacher can best help the student understand this idiomatic expression by: Select one: A. discussing with the student more examples of the phrase used in context. B. directing the student to look up different meanings of "fell" and "swoop" in the dictionary. C. helping the student create a tree diagram of the structure of the phrase. D. asking the student to find other sentences in the text that use the words "fell" and "swoop".
A. The phrase "one fell swoop" is an idiom. An idiomatic expression is a sequence of words that has a specific meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the component words. In addition to explaining the idiom's specific meaning, the most effective way to promote a student's understanding of a new idiom is to provide the student with several examples of the idiom used in comprehensible contexts.
During weekly independent reading time, fifth-grade students read high-interest literature and record their thoughts, reactions, and questions in a teacher-student dialogue journal. The dialogue journal activity is likely to promote the students' reading proficiency primarily by: A. promoting students' appreciation for literary genres and exposing them to the various features of literary texts. B. encouraging students' active construction of meaning with a text and developing their literary response skills. C. expanding students' vocabulary knowledge and providing them with extensive, varied reading experiences. D. increasing students' reading fluency and facilitating their rapid automatic word recognition.
B. Since each student in the class is likely to be reading different texts during independent reading, dialogue journals can be an effective strategy for teachers to use to both monitor and promote students' comprehension of these texts. Typically, teachers make comments and ask questions in the journals to help students clarify their thinking about a text and/or to facilitate their ability to make personal connections to it.
Which of the following text features are students likely to find most useful when previewing informational texts such as library books for a research project? Select one: A. glossary B. table of contents C. bibliography D. index
B. A table of contents shows how the content of a text is organized and provides clues to the types of information the reader is likely to find in each section. Skimming a text's table of contents provides a reader with a quick and effective preview of the text's content. This allows a reader to determine whether the text might be useful for a particular research project.
Sixth-grade students have just finished reading a chapter in a novel and are getting ready to write an entry in their response journals. The teacher could most effectively develop students' literary response skills by assigning which of the following journal prompts? A. Which characters are mentioned in this chapter? List each of the characters. B. What do you think is the main idea or theme of the novel? Relate specific events in this chapter to the theme you suggest. C. What happened in the chapter? Describe two or three events from the chapter. D. What new vocabulary words did you learn when reading this chapter? List and define the new words from the chapter
B. At the secondary level, formal literary response involves developing a thesis and providing evidence from the text to support the thesis. To help sixth graders learn how to construct an effective literary response to a text, the teacher should provide opportunities, such as prompted writing in response journals, to develop a thesis related to a text (e.g., identifying a main idea or theme of the text), and then to support their thesis by citing evidence from the text.
Phonemic awareness contributes most to the development of phonics skills in beginning readers by helping them: Select one: A. understand the concept of a silent letter. B. identify in spoken language separate sounds that can be mapped to letters C. count the number of syllables in a written word D. recognize different ways in which one sound can be represented in print.
B. English is an alphabetic language--that is, a language in which the letters and letter patterns in written words can be mapped to the phonemes of the spoken words. Phonemic awareness, the recognition of the phonemes in spoken words, and the ability to segment and blend phonemes are critical to learning to apply knowledge of these letter patterns and letter-sound correspondence (i.e., phonics knowledge) to decode and encode printed 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: Select one: A. has difficulty sounding out phonetically regular one-syllable words. B. needs more development with phonemic awareness skills. C. lacks automaticity in word recognition. D. needs to increase reading fluency and comprehension.
B. In the activity described, students are asked to isolate and pronounce separately the final sound, or phoneme, of a familiar word. Learning to isolate the final sound in a word is a step toward mastering phonemic segmentation, an important phonemic awareness skill that supports literacy development in English.
As students begin to read, the ability to blend phonemes orally contributes to their reading development primarily because it helps students: Select one: A. divide written words into onsets and rimes. B. use knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to decode words. C. recognize and understand sight words in a text. D. guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from their context.
B. Phonemic blending is the ability to combine a sequence of speech sounds (phonemes) together to form a word. Beginning readers use their skill in phonemic blending and their knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to sound out and blend the sounds of simple printed words.
A second-grade teacher notices that one of her students lacks fluency when reading aloud. The first thing the teacher should do in order to help this student is assess whether the student also has difficulties with: Select one: A. inferring. B. decoding. C. metacognition. D. predicting.
B. Reading fluency is integral to reading comprehension. The key indicators of reading fluency are accuracy, rate, and prosody. In the primary grades, the most common factor disrupting fluency is weak decoding skills, which most directly affects reading accuracy but affects the other indicators as well (e.g., by causing a slow rate or resulting in choppy reading).
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: A. strengthen and extend their understanding of the overall structure of the text. B. extend and reinforce their expressive and receptive vocabularies related to the text's topic. C. verify word meanings in the text by incorporating syntactic and semantic cues into their word analysis. D. infer the meaning of new vocabulary in the text based on word derivations.
B. Grouping words related to a text based on conceptual categories and the words' associative meanings helps deepen students' understanding of the vocabulary. Discussing and justifying connections among the words further enhances students' understanding of the words and promotes retention of new words
Read the sentence below; then answer the question that follows. My family went to the circus last weekend. I liked the clowns the best. They were very funny. A student makes several miscues when reading these sentences aloud. Which of the following miscues represents an error in decoding consonant blends? Select one: A. pronouncing clowns as clones B. saying bet for best C. shortening funny to fun D. omitting circus
B. A consonant blend is a sequence of two or more consonants in a word, each of which represents a separate phoneme. For example, the sequence of consonants at the end of the word best represents the sequence of phonemes /s/ and /t/. A student who says bet for best is omitting the letter s, an error in decoding the consonant blend at the end of the word.
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? Select one: A. development of letter-sound correspondence B. understanding of the alphabetic principle C. phonemic awareness skills D. word identification skills
C. In the activity described, the student is prompted to say a word and then count the number of sounds, or phonemes, in the word as he pronounces the word again. By focusing attention on the individual component sounds of the word, the student is practicing phonemic segmentation, an important phonemic awareness skill in the continuum of phonological awareness skills.
Skimming is likely to be the most effective strategy for accomplishing which of the following reading tasks? Select one: A. synthesizing information from various sources for a research report B. evaluating the validity of information on an Internet Web site C. previewing a chapter in a content-area textbook D. studying specific facts for a content- area exam
C. Skimming involves a quick, superficial reading of a text to get an overall impression of the material. This would be an appropriate and effective strategy for previewing a textbook chapter.
In which of the following sentences is context most helpful in understanding the italicized word? Select one: Mary is magnanimous in all of her dealings with people, even when she does not know a person well. Tulip trees are ubiquitous in Virginia and in some other parts of the United States as well. Peter's mother was adamant that he should attend college, but his father did not seem to care. John's friends surreptitiously planned a housewarming party for him soon after he had moved in.
C. This sentence provides a reader with both syntactic and semantic clues as to the meaning of the italicized word adamant. First, the coordinating conjunction but sets up a comparison between the two independent clauses, which immediately alerts the reader that the meaning of the second clause contrasts the meaning of the first clause. Next, the meaning of the second clause is simple and clear—Peter's father did not seem to care whether or not Peter attended college. Thus, we now know that Peter's mother must have felt very strongly that he should attend. Indeed, someone who is adamant about something is unshakable or unmovable in his or her belief.
A kindergarten teacher could best determine if a child has begun to develop phonemic awareness by asking the child to: Select one: A. listen to the teacher say boat and coat, then identify whether the two words rhyme. B. count the number of words the child hears in a sentence as the teacher says the sentence. C. point to the correct letter on an alphabet chart as the teacher names specific letters. D. say the word cat, then say the first sound the child hears in the word.
D. Phonemic awareness, a type of phonological awareness, is the recognition that spoken words are made up of phonemes, the discrete speech sounds of a language. Segmenting the first sound in a spoken word is one of the first phonemic awareness skills to develop, and therefore saying the first sound one hears in a word is an effective informal procedure for assessing phonemic awareness in the beginning stages.
A fifth-grade teacher gives students a reading guide to complete as they read an informational text. The reading guide contains several questions to answer and a chart to complete, as well as comprehension aids for potentially challenging vocabulary and passages. This activity is likely to be most effective for achieving which of the following instructional purposes? Select one: A. teaching students to adjust their reading rate based on text difficulty B. supporting students' development of reading fluency C. fostering students' motivation to read cooperatively D. encouraging students to interact with the text
D. Reading guides such as the one described compel students to interact with the content of a text as they read so they can complete the activities in the guide. Such guides can also provide scaffolding for students to enhance their comprehension by clarifying challenging vocabulary and passages.
A sixth-grade teacher has students work in small groups to begin to develop a KWL chart before they read a textbook chapter about the human brain. Using a KWL chart in this way is most likely to help the students: A. identify main ideas and supporting details in the chapter. B. synthesize information from various sections of the chapter. C. visualize the terms and concepts in the chapter. D. connect their background knowledge to information in the chapter.
D. The first two columns in a KWL chart prompt students to think about what they already know about a topic and what else they want to learn about it. These are effective prereading activities because the first helps activate students' prior text-related knowledge, which activates relevant schema to support comprehension, and the second encourages students to set a purpose for their reading, which promotes engagement with the text and enhances comprehension. The third column in a KWL chart prompts students to reflect on what they have learned from the text. In this way, completing the chart facilitates students' ability to make connections between their current background knowledge and new information from the text.
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: Select one: A.are beginning to master the alphabetic principle. B.are beginning to develop systematic phonics skills. C.have a relatively low level of phonological awareness. D.have a relatively high level of phonemic awareness.
D. The procedure described—presenting students with a spoken word and having them say all the sounds in the word—is an example of a phoneme-segmentation task. Reading research indicates that phonological and phonemic awareness skills develop along a continuum from basic to higher-level skills, and effective instruction targets skills at a student's current level of development. Segmenting phonemes is a relatively high-level phonemic awareness skill; thus, this exercise would be most appropriate for students who have already achieved a relatively high level of phonemic awareness.
When learning letter-sound correspondence, beginning readers are likely to require the most instruction in decoding which of the following? Select one: A. ship B. hot C. best D. dime
D. Reading research indicates that beginning readers benefit most from phonics instruction that is systematic—presented according to the increasing complexity of linguistic units.
Which of the following describes an implicit strategy for extending and reinforcing students' phonics skills? Select one: A. asking students to sound out new words that follow a common regular spelling pattern B. having students sort sets of familiar words into their designated word families C. guiding students to spell new multisyllable words using known words and word parts D. encouraging students to look for particular words and word parts in environmental print
D. An implicit instructional strategy is one in which the learning goal of the instruction or activity is not explicitly stated or directly taught. Implicit strategies for teaching phonics do not directly present students with information about phonics patterns but rely on students to notice—incidentally and independently— the phonics patterns represented in whole words they are learning to read. Since the focus of this activity is words and word parts—not explicitly identified phonics patterns but larger units—students who extend and reinforce their phonics knowledge during this activity will do so because they independently discern phonics patterns among the uncontrolled set of words they encounter in environmental print.
Which of the following first-grade students has attained the highest level of phonemic awareness? Select one: A.a student who can orally segment the word wonderful into won-der-ful B.a student who, after hearing the words fish and fun, can identify that they both begin with the same phoneme, /f/ C.a student who can orally segment the word train into its onset and rime D.a student who, after hearing the word hot and the sound /ĭ/, can substitute /ĭ/ for /ŏ/ to make the word hit
D. Phonemic awareness, the ability to distinguish and manipulate the phonemes in spoken words, is a type of phonological awareness. Reading research indicates that phonological and phonemic awareness skills develop along a continuum from basic to higher-level skills, and that phoneme substitution is a more difficult, or higher-level, skill. Substituting the sound /ĭ/ for /ŏ/ in the word hot to make the word hit is an example of phoneme substitution.
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? Select one: A. Break the word into its component parts, and then compare the parts to the meanings of similar known words. B. Make note of the word in a vocabulary log, and then study the word after finishing the story. C. Use context cues in the sentence to guess the meaning of the word, and then try out that meaning in the sentence. D. Look up the word in the dictionary, and then paraphrase the sentence using the dictionary definition.
D. Stopping to consult a dictionary is generally disruptive to the reading process; however, in some situations, as with the sentence shown in the box, consulting a dictionary is the only effective method for determining the meaning of an unfamiliar term encountered in a text. Also, paraphrasing the sentence by substituting the dictionary definition for the unfamiliar term is a good method for both reinforcing understanding of the new term and returning the reader to the flow of the story. The other strategies given would not be effective in this particular situation.
A text includes the word indefensible, which is unfamiliar to some students in a fourth- grade class. 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' vocabulary development? A. Have the students enter the word in their ongoing list of new vocabulary words and then look up its definition independently. B. Ask the students to paraphrase the sentence that contains the word by substituting a synonym for the word. C. Explain the meaning of the word to the students before they read the text. D. Discuss the meanings of other words having the same affixes or root and then ask the students to try to "construct" the word's meaning.
D. Teaching students to use structural analysis and their knowledge of familiar English morphemes (i.e., the root defense and the affixes in- and -ible) to deduce the meaning of a new word containing these morphemes provides students with a powerful independent word-learning strategy. This strategy immediately extends students' understanding of both the target word and other words that contain these morphemes.
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. This technique is likely to be most helpful for enhancing the students' awareness of: Select one: A. compound words. B. syllable patterns. C. Greek roots. D. morphemic structure.
D. The web shown shows a circle with the base word act in the center and connected to four word lists that are categorized according to different morphological processes—clockwise, adding suffixes or inflectional endings, adding prefixes, adding both, and creating compound words. Thus, the chart illustrates an analysis of morphemes according to type and how these types of morphemes are combined, promoting an understanding of the morphemic structure in words.
Which of the following students is demonstrating the specific type of phonological awareness known as phonemic awareness? A. a student who, after being shown a letter of the alphabet, can orally identify its corresponding sound(s) B. a student who listens to the word Massachusetts and can determine that it contains four syllables C. a student who listens to the words sing, ring, fling, and hang and can identify that hang is different D. a student who, after hearing the word hat, can orally identify that it ends with the sound /t/
D;Phonemic awareness is the recognition that spoken words are made up of phonemes--the discrete speech sounds of a language. Identifying the final sound (or phoneme) in a word, such as the /t/ in the word hat, demonstrates phonemic awareness.