Literacy Development

Which of the following syllable types is the first syllable of the word "excellent"?

A closed syllable

Which of the following best describes a characteristic of a high frequency word?

A high frequency word is a word that is commonly used and immediately recognized as a whole. These words do not require word analysis for identification. Sight words are usually high-frequency words.

The following sets of words could be used to demonstrate which of the following principles? -ful -ment bountiful merriment grateful judgment pitiful enlightenment careful embodiment boastful management

A root word that ends in y is usually changed to i when a suffix is added onto the end.

How should a teacher strategically coordinate spelling instruction with decoding?

by linking the teaching of spelling rules with practice in decoding words that demonstrate the rule

Which instructional strategy would be most appropriate when teaching students to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words when reading a short story?

contextual analysis

A student is attempting to determine the pronunciation and meaning of a word while reading a sentence. Which of the following could help with this unfamiliar word? Select all answers that apply.

contextual analysis structural analysis

A second-grade student typically spells most words accurately in her writing and is able to read familiar words, but she struggles to read new words accurately. Which of the following would best support this student?

decoding skills Decoding is the ability to sound out a word. This described student is able to read familiar words, but not new words, so she appears to be depending on her memory to recognize words and not her ability to sound them out.

While reading, a student comes across the unknown word "sanitize." He notices in the sentence the words "dirty, " "but," and "now clean." He determines that sanitize must be the opposite of dirty. Which strategy did he use to define the unknown word?

defining meaning from context clues

A student comes across the unknown word "resurface" while reading a story taking place on a lake. She thinks about how "surface" means top of the lake and determines that "resurface" must mean coming up to the top again. Which strategy did she use to define the unknown word?

defining meaning from structural clues and morphology

While reading, a student comes across the unknown word "extracellular." He notices the prefix "extra-" and determines that the word means something like "having more cells." While he did not correctly define the word, which strategy did he use in his attempt to define the unknown word?

defining meaning from structural clues and morphology

An ESL teacher presents an activity to her beginning-level ELLs in which she introduces predictable spelling patterns in word families to ELLs. Which of the following skills is this activity mainly helping the students develop?

grammar skills

Cindy continues to write the word "hole" when she means "whole." Cindy needs further instruction in:

homophones.

A first-grade teacher would like her students to be able to work on whole-word reading (identifying words automatically) while using the phonics skills she has taught the past few class periods. The students have shown an ability to successfully sound out and blend words that follow predictable phonics patterns. Which of the following approaches would best provide students the opportunity to practice these skills?

giving students opportunities to sound out words that follow a regular phonics pattern and then having them read the words normally in a short text

Which of the following would NOT be described as a sight word in a second-grade classroom?

missed

Which of the following best describes the segment "pre" in "prescribe."

prefix

Which of the following best describes the segment "un" in "unbelievable."

prefix

In the word unreliableness, the underlined part is the:

prefix.

Which of the following are acceptable resources to verify the meaning of unfamiliar words? Select all answers that apply.

print dictionary online dictionary glossary

Strategies that can be used to best build growth in word analysis and identification include all of the following except:

"popcorn" reading in which one student starts reading a passage in front of the class and another says "popcorn" and continues the reading.

The following sentence is missing several words. It can be ___(1)___ to find a moment to ___(2)___ your thoughts into the ___(3)___ when there are many people participating in a ___(4)___. A word with the prefix inter- would best fit in which of the following blanks?

(2) The prefix inter- means between or among. A word like interject would work well in blank number 2 because the speaker is attempting to insert their voice and ideas among many other voices.

A teacher notices that students are struggling to decode words such as "moon", "groan", and "boat". Which of the following areas of instruction should the teacher plan to support students' decoding skills?

vowel digrahphs

Which activity would fit in a unit focusing on enhancing student abilities in word recognition?

After studying some common prefixes, suffixes, and root words, play a game where students generate as many words as possible that use a specific root, prefix, or suffix.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between the development of spelling and decoding skills?

Children generally develop decoding and spelling skills at the same time.

Which of the following best describes the difference between a consonant digraph and a consonant blend?

Consonant digraphs form a new sound, whereas consonant blends retain the letters' original sounds while blending them together.

The words trying, writing, happening, heating demonstrate which of the following principles?

Depending on the ending letter of the root word, the addition of a suffix may impact the spelling of the root.

What is the name of a common tool teachers use to guide their high-frequency word instruction?

Dolch list

A first-grade teacher assigns a three-sentence writing assignment to students. As students begin working, the teacher notices a student asking another student how to spell the word fish. The teacher asks the student if she can sound the word out, and the student says, "/fff/.../iii/.../ssshhh/," but she can't think of the letters to write. Which of the following strategies could the teacher implement to help this student encode letters and write them down?

Give the student letter/sound picture cards in which each letter of the alphabet is in the shape of something that starts with that letter.

Which of the following is the most appropriate way for a teacher to help students develop the ability to break words into individual sounds?

Have students practice breaking apart simple words of two or three letters.

Which of the following activities would best help a teacher develop a student's understanding of phonics?

Have the student use letter tiles to create words.

A second-grade teacher uses the following handout to introduce a new topic. Choose ONE of the following words to correctly complete BOTH of the following sentences. bus train teach show car I rode in a ________ to visit my grandmother. I hope to ________ my dog to roll over. Now work with a partner to write two sentences. Each sentence must show a different meaning of the word right. Which of the following concepts is the teacher introducing to her class?

Homographs

A second-grade teacher would like to help students develop their phonological awareness skills by teaching them to decode words faster as they read. Which of the following concepts should the teacher focus on to help students achieve this goal?

How to separate words into syllables

Which of the following describes a way that spelling instruction can support the decoding skills of early readers?

Memorizing common letter patterns through spelling can then be applied to unfamiliar words with similar structures when reading.

Which of the following is the most appropriate way for a teacher to help young students develop an understanding of print elements?

Provide direct and indirect instruction on concepts like punctuation, the progression of text, and the difference between letters, words, and sentences.

Which of the following activities would best support a student's ability to decode multisyllabic words?

Provide practice matching prefixes, roots, and suffixes to create new words.

A first-grade classroom teacher has been busy teaching letter-sound correspondence, mostly in isolation. What is the next step the teacher should take to provide her students with systematic phonics instruction?

Provide students the opportunity to read decodable texts containing the phonics skills she has been teaching.

Which of the following describes the best way for elementary students to learn decoding skills?

Students should practice decoding words in books that are at their reading level.

Which of the following best describes decoding?

Students sound out the phonemes of the word and associate the sound of the word to the correct definition.

A student in a third-grade class is attempting to determine the meaning of the word "scrawny" in the following sentence. There was Sam, ten years old with long, skinny legs and equally scrawny arms, but he had a smile that lit up any room he walked into. Which of the following would best support the student in an attempt to infer the word's meaning?

Syntatic analysis

A preschool aged child points to the sign that says "Target" and identifies the letters in the word, but tells her mom that the sign says "store." What does this demonstrate about the child?

The child has developed print awareness. This is the best answer because it the child is aware of the text, recognizes that it is meant to represent the name of the building, and even knows the names of the letters. The child does not correctly connect sounds to those letters and mistakenly guesses what the word says.

Halfway through the school year, a first-grade teacher wants to administer a summative assessment to determine student mastery of the grade-level sight words taught over the course of the semester. Which of the following informal assessments would be the best suited to meet this goal?

The teacher posts the sight words on a word wall, having each student take a turn saying them privately to the teacher, and records the results.

Which of the following strategies would help a group of students develop an understanding of text directionality?

The teacher reads to the class daily from oversized books, discussing the front and back covers before beginning, and pointing to the words as she reads them.

Which of the following is true about consonant blends?

They blend two or more consonants while each letter retains its original sound.

A third-grade teacher writes the following sentence on the board: Despite being the last to use the bathroom pass, the student emphatically denied being the one that lost it. She asks the students to write down the meaning of the word emphatically without looking it up in the dictionary. How does the teacher expect the students to determine the word's meaning?

Use context clues to predict the word's meaning.

A first-grade teacher creates a fun, engaging story and writes the story on flashcards. The teacher writes unfamiliar words larger than the familiar words so they are easy for students to identify. As the teacher reads to the class, the teacher points to each word as he reads it. After reading through the story one time, the teacher reads the flashcards a second time and tells the students when he points to a word written in big letters to say the word along with him. Which of the following reading skills is this activity most promoting?

Word recognition

Which of the following syllable types is the first syllable in "eating"?

a vowel team syllable

Which of the following syllable types is the last syllable in the word "rename"?

a vowel-consonant-e syllable

In order to support his student's development of word recognition skills, the teacher should strive to develop their abilities in which of the following areas?

application of phonics generalizations

A kindergarten teacher would like to assess her students' understanding of print concepts. Which informal assessment activity would best achieve this goal?

asking students to point to the words of a familiar text while they read with the teacher

In the word applause, which pair of letters represents a dipthong?

au

A first-grade student is reading aloud and mispronounces the following words: after, old, ask, and what. The student could benefit from additional instruction in which of the following areas?

automatic recognition of high-frequency words

Students will learn to read phonetically regular words in a simple to complex progression. Of the skills provided, which of the following skills would most likely be the earliest skill mastered?

blending onsets and rimes

A teacher is providing instruction on root words. Which of the following is not a good example of root words to use with the class?

boyhood, childhood, neighborhood

A first-grade class has recently attended a play at a local concert hall. After seeing the play, the students read a book that tells the story to the students using grade-level appropriate vocabulary. Because students already know the basic plot of the story, the teacher is able to pause often and have students practice reading and saying decodable words. Then, the teacher forms small table groups and gives students sentence strips. She asks the groups to write a short summary of the story by writing one sentence per paper strip. While walking around, the students ask the teacher how to spell several decodable words from the text. The teacher tells the students to sound out the words as they spell them. By asking the students to sound out the words, the teacher is:

encouraging students to use what they know about letter/sound correspondence in their writing.

A first-grade teacher is using the strategy of phoneme-grapheme mapping to help students master necessary phonics skills. The teacher reads students short, predictable texts focused on a particular letter sound, such as short i or short o. At the end of one week of reading a particular short text, the teacher presents a small group of students with the chart below. The teacher calls out one target word from the books at a time while students write the word and separate the phonemes on the chart. The students are told to put only one sound in each box. bag b a g run r u n jog j o g Considering the fundamentals of phonics instruction, these activities help students to understand:

how to effectively decode and encode text while reading and writing.

A student is having a difficult time reading the word "slippery" and soon after asks for help with the word "underneath." Which of the following strategies would best support this student in learning to decode these and other multisyllabic words independently?

identify the different syllables of the word by circling them and then sounding out the word by syllables

Which of the following best represents a direct benefit of learning common spelling patterns?

improved accuracy when reading

A reading teacher writes the following groups of words on the board: eat want slow eating wanted slower eats wanting slowest wants slowed She organizes the class into pairs and assigns each pair a group of words, asking them to write a sentence using each word. What concept is the teacher most likely covering with this lesson?

inflectional morphemes

The morphemes -ed, -er, -est, -ing, and -s are examples of: Select all answers that apply.

inflectional morphemes.

Words that are impossible for students to sound out, such as their, of, and could, should be taught during which of the following reading lessons?

irregular words

Which of the following words contain a closed syllable? Select all answers that apply.

pan resign

Which of the following words does not contain an example of a consonant digraph?

past

After a student has mastered letter-sound correspondences, what is a likely next step in their reading instruction?

phoneme blending

Which of the following is not a component of print concepts?

phonemic awareness Phonemic awareness is the recognition of individual sounds that make up words. It is not a print concept.

The words car, stir, swirled, curtain, and remember would all be relevant in a lesson focused on which of the following concepts?

r-controlled vowels

A second-grade teacher reads a poem aloud to the class and has the students write all the rhyming words on their paper. In this poem, all the rhyming words end with the same spelling pattern. The students are then asked to underline the beginning letters of the rhyming words. Which of the following does this activity best promote? Select all answers that apply.

recognizing segmentation building on word families increasing spelling abilities

After taking a field trip to a local farm, a class reads a short story about animals who live on a farm. During the reading, the teacher has students help her decode words with phonemes the students have recently learned. After reading, the teacher breaks the students into small groups and has them help her generate sentences about farm animals. After the students say a sentence, the teacher writes the sentence on paper. She asks the students to help her spell out words containing letter sounds they discussed during the reading. By asking the students to help her sound out and spell words, the teacher is:

reinforcing phonics skills through both encoding and decoding.

While reading a new passage, a student raises her hand and asks, "What does this word mean?" Instead of defining the word for her, the teacher should encourage the student to determine the meaning of the word by:

searching the sentence and surrounding sentences for context clues like synonyms, antonyms, or examples.

A first-grade teacher creates a fun, engaging story and writes the story on flashcards. The teacher writes unfamiliar words larger than the familiar words so they are easy for students to identify. As the teacher reads to the class, the teacher points to each word as he reads it. After reading through the story one time, the teacher reads the flashcards a second time and tells the students when he points to a word written in big letters to say the word along with him. Which of the following is this activity most likely to help first-graders learn?

sight words

During a decoding exercise, a first-grade teacher noticed a student could not decode new words when particular suffixes were added to the word. This student would most benefit from which of the following instruction?

structural analysis

Which of the following best describes the segment "able" in "unforgettable."

suffix

Which of the following words contains a vowel digraph?

sweep

A class of first-grade students has been learning how to decode words. Which of the following lessons would be the best way to teach them to decode words ending in the inflectional morpheme -ed?

teaching students to read the -ed by itself and then decode the front of the word before the inflection before adding them together

Which of the following is NOT a goal of teaching phonics and word recognition skills?

the ability to use metacognition to self-monitor reading comprehension

Which of the following syllables types is the last syllable in "star"?

the r-controlled syllable

At the beginning of the year, during open house, a preschool teacher always welcomes her class by reading aloud one of her favorite books. She holds the book up for everyone to see the words and pictures, and she uses her finger to move along the text as she reads. She then encourages parents to also track their progress through books at home by tracing the line of text as they read. Which of the following is the teacher's reason for this suggestion?

to help students develop an understanding of print orientation

Students in a kindergarten class have recently learned how to decode words that end with -at. Their teacher writes the word mat on a chart and asks the students to suggest other words that end with the -at sound while listing them on the paper underneath. After a few minutes, they have the following list of words: mat bat flat cat sat that What is the most likely goal of this activity?

to reinforce spelling and decoding skills

Even though her students cannot yet read, a preschool teacher labels each of their backpack hooks with their names, labels commonly used items around the room, and has an assortment of books available for them to access independently. Which of the following best explains why this teacher has prioritized making her classroom a print rich environment?

to support and encourage student understanding of the forms and functions of printed language A print rich environment is important even before a child learns to read in order to develop an awareness of print.

Vowel digraphs are defined as:

two vowels that make only one sound.

A preschool-aged child scribbles on a piece of paper and calls it her grocery list. On the back, she draws a picture of her and her mom in the grocery store. At the store, she pretends to read food items off the side containing the scribbles, asking her mom to buy various items. This behavior suggests that the child:

understands that text functions differently than pictures. The child described in the question is demonstrating an understanding of how text differs from drawing pictures.

Which of the following words should a teacher use to demonstrate structural analysis for word identification?

unknown

A first-grade teacher is reading aloud from an instructional text on the life cycle of a butterfly. During the reading, she stops to think-aloud with the goal of teaching the class a specific reading skill. Here is an excerpt of the think-aloud with the teacher's dialogue in italics. There are four parts to the life cycle of a butterfly. First, a butterfly lays an ovum, or egg, on a leaf. I wonder what an "ovum" is. I'm going to reread the sentence before and look at the phrases around the word to see if I can figure it out. The word "egg" is right after, and that makes sense. The butterfly chooses a plant that can provide the larvae with food. Once born, the tiny caterpillar starts eating and molts its skin often. I wonder what the word "larvae" means. After reading before and after the word, it seems like the next sentence calls the "larvae" a "tiny caterpillar." You might see pieces of skin coming off the larvae as it grows. Then, the larvae forms a pupa, or chrysalis. Inside the chrysalis, the pupa is growing into a butterfly. Finally, the chrysalis opens and a beautiful butterfly emerges to dry its wings and fly away. I wonder if a pupa and a chrysalis are the same thing? It seems like the words are used close together and that they both mean the home where the butterfly grows. While conducting this think-aloud, the teacher is modeling which aspect of textual analysis?

using context clues Throughout the text, the teacher models how to use context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words.

Multiple times a year a third-grade teacher administers a formal assessment of her students' oral reading fluency. While assessing a student's reading, she notices that the child performs well on the portion of the test that asks the student to read a paragraph, but struggles when reading many of the same words in list form. Which of the following would best describe a strength of this student?

using context clues to determine a word

A first-grade teacher would like to improve her students' ability to track print when it appears on consecutive lines in a book. Several students in the class have a good understanding of the alphabet, corresponding letter sounds, and simple decoding, but they struggle to understand longer lines of text. Which of the following strategies could she use as she models reading a short paragraph containing simple vocabulary in front of the class?

using her finger to touch each word while reading slowly from left to right on the page

Beyond word memorization, students must learn to read new words using which of the following skills? Select all answers that apply.

using structural cues such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots using decoding skills using context clues

Teaching students to use contextual analysis when reading unfamiliar words is likely to help their accuracy by helping the student:

verify the accuracy of their reading by considering the word's meaning within the sentence.

Which of the following word sets would best support a lesson on structural analysis?

visit, revisit, visitor, visiting

When learning to decode, which type of words should be taught first?

words that follow the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern