When learning letter-sound correspondence, beginning readers are likely to require the most instruction in decoding which of the following?
Which of the following best describes the relationship between word decoding and reading comprehension in a beginning reader’s development?
- Decoding skills and reading comprehension skills tend to develop independently of one another.
- Reading comprehension skills directly facilitate the development of decoding skills.
- Development of decoding skills is secondary to the development of reading fluency and comprehension skills.
- Rapid automatic decoding skills help facilitate development of reading fluency and comprehension.
A teacher can most effectively support first graders’ development of rapid automatic word recognition by first teaching students how to:
- apply consistent phonics generalizations in common words.
- use context cues to determine the meanings of words.
- identify the constituent parts of multisyllable words.
- look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary.
Which of the following describes an implicit strategy for extending and reinforcing students’ phonics skills?
- encouraging students to look for particular words and word parts in environmental print
- having students sort sets of familiar words into their designated word families
- asking students to sound out new words that follow a common regular spelling pattern
- guiding students to spell new multisyllable words using known words and word parts
Which of the following strategies would be most effective in promoting second graders’ decoding of multisyllable words?
- giving students opportunities to read literature that offers repeated exposure to predictable text
- prompting students to sound out the individual phonemes that compose multisyllable words
- encouraging students to compare the parts of new multisyllable words with known single-syllable words
- reinforcing students’ recognition of high-frequency multisyllable words using drills and flashcards
A second-grade teacher writes several sentences on the board, covering up one word in each sentence.
She uncovers the first letter of the first covered word and asks students to guess the word before she uncovers it completely.
She then follows the same procedure with the next sentence. In the example shown below, the students have completed sentences
1 and 2 and are currently working on sentence 3.
- Paul likes to play football.
- Elephants are the largest land animals.
- We went to the m last Friday.
This activity is most likely to promote the students’ word identification skills by helping them:
- use syllabication as a decoding strategy.
- apply phonics generalizations to decode multisyllable words.
- use semantic and syntactic cues to help identify words.
- apply common consonant-vowel patterns to decode unfamiliar words.
A second-grade teacher administers spelling inventories periodically to help assess students’ phonics knowledge.
The following shows one student’s performance on a spelling inventory at the beginning of the school year and again several months later.
| Dictated Word |
Student Spelling |
| set |
set |
| star |
ster |
| drive |
driv |
| peach |
pech |
| turn |
tarn |
| join |
joyn |
| Dictated Word |
Student Spelling |
| set |
set |
| star |
star |
| drive |
drive |
| peach |
peche |
| turn |
turn |
| join |
joyn |
The student’s performance on the second administration of the spelling inventory indicates that the student made the most improvement
in which of the following areas?
- initial and final consonants
- short vowels and diphthongs
- digraphs and blends
- long and r-controlled vowels
Which of the following provides the best rationale for incorporating spelling instruction into a first- grade reading program?
- Spelling promotes phonemic awareness by teaching students to break words into onsets and rimes.
- Spelling facilitates vocabulary development by introducing students to new words.
- Spelling simplifies the reading process by focusing students on a limited set of decoding rules.
- Spelling supports word recognition by helping students learn and retain common phonics patterns.
Which of the following statements best describes how oral vocabulary knowledge is related to the process of decoding written words?
- A reader applies decoding skills to unfamiliar written words in order to increase his or her oral vocabulary knowledge.
- A reader’s oral vocabulary knowledge allows the reader to derive meaning as he or she decodes
written words.
- A reader must have extensive oral vocabulary knowledge in order to learn decoding processes.
- A reader’s oral vocabulary knowledge is dependent on his or her development of strong decoding
skills.
Read the sentence below; then answer the question that follows.
My family went to the circus last weekend. I liked the clowns 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?
- omitting circus
- pronouncing clowns as clones
- saying bet for best
- shortening funny to fun
Which of the following sentences contains a pair of italicized words that differ from one another by one phoneme?
- He took off his cap so that he could take a nap.
- She works at a bank that is located near the bank of a river.
- She told him not to buy a ticket because she had already bought one.
- His face looked pale after he carried the pail of water for a mile.
Which of the following students demonstrates variation in reading development that would require intervention focused on explicit phonics instruction?
- a kindergarten student who can recite the alphabet from memory but has difficulty distinguishing
individual phonemes in words
- a first-grade student who can easily decode nonsense words but has limited comprehension of the
meaning of text
- a second-grade student who is adept at using context cues to identify words but has difficulty sounding
out the letters in unfamiliar words
- a third-grade student who can read most grade-level text fluently but has difficulty with unfamiliar
irregular low-frequency words
Explicit phonics instruction is most appropriate for a student who has demonstrated which of the following phonological awareness skills?
- being aware that a word is made up of one or more phonemes
- being able to separate a word’s onset and rime
- being aware that words can be divided into syllables
- being able to segment and blend a word’s phonemes
Questions from the Foundations of Reading Test. Copyright ©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s).
All rights reserved. Evaluation Systems, Pearson, P.O. Box 226, Amherst, MA 01004.