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:

Extend and reinforce their expressive and receptive vocabularies related to the text’s topic.
Infer the meaning of new vocabulary in the text based on word derivations.
Strengthen and extend their understanding of the overall structure of the text.
Verify word meanings in the text by incorporating syntactic and semantic cues into their word analysis.

A first grade teacher designs the following activity:

Divide students into pairs.

Have students sit back-to-back.

Give one student in each pair a picture of a familiar object to describe to his partner.

The partner tries to name the object based on the description.

This activity is likely to contribute to students’ literacy development primarily by:

Helping them begin to make connections between print and the spoken word.
Fostering their ability to work independently of teacher guidance.
Promoting their oral language development and listening comprehension.
Encouraging them to practice speaking skills.

A beginning reader can sound out and write phonetically regular one- and two- syllable words. When reading sentences or longer texts, however, the student frequently has poor comprehension. Which of the following is the first step the teacher should take in order to promote this student’s reading proficiency?

Evaluate the student’s ability to apply grade-level-appropriate phonics generalization.
Evaluate the level of the student’s phonemic and phonological awareness.
Ascertain the degree to which the student uses syntactic cues.
Ascertain the level of the student’s vocabulary development.

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?

Words that are conceptually challenging
High-frequency, phonetically irregular words
Multisyllable words
High-frequency words with multiple meanings

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?

Have the students enter the word in their ongoing list of new vocabulary words and then look up its definition independently.
Explain the meaning of the word to the students before they read the text.
Discuss the meanings of other words having the same affixes or root and then ask the students to try to ÒconstructÓ the word’s meaning.
Ask the students to paraphrase the sentence that contains the word by substituting a synonym for the word.

In which of the following sentences is context most helpful in understanding the italicized word?

Tulip trees are ubiquitous in Virginia and in some other parts of the United States as well.
John’s friends surreptitiously planned a housewarming party for him soon after he had moved in.
Mary is magnanimous in all of her dealings with people, even when she does not know a person well.
Peter’s mother was adamant that he should attend college, but his father did not seem to care.

Students in a third-grade class are studying different forms of transportation that are used around the world. As part of this unit of study, they work together to create a semantic map of words associated with transportation, including words that they have recently learned (e.g., barge, rickshaw). This activity is most likely to promote students’ vocabulary development by:

Showing them how structural analysis can be used to determine the meaning of new vocabulary.
Helping them to categorize, visualize, and remember new vocabulary.
Guiding them to discover the multiple meanings of new vocabulary.
Provide them with frequent, varied reading experiences using the new vocabulary.