CALT CALT Reading Fluency and Decoding Development 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which approach best describes 'repeated reading' as an instructional fluency technique?
- Reading a new passage silently multiple times before reading aloud
- Reading the same passage multiple times to increase rate and accuracy (Correct answer)
- Reading different passages at the same difficulty level consecutively
- Reading aloud with a partner who corrects every error immediately
Correct answer: Reading the same passage multiple times to increase rate and accuracy
Repeated reading involves re-reading the same text multiple times until a fluency criterion is met, improving rate, accuracy, and prosody.
Question 2: A student consistently omits the inflectional suffix '-ed' when reading past-tense verbs aloud. Which phonological skill is most likely underdeveloped?
- Phoneme blending
- Morpheme awareness and decoding of inflectional endings (Correct answer)
- Sight word recognition
- Syllable segmentation of multisyllabic words
Correct answer: Morpheme awareness and decoding of inflectional endings
Omitting '-ed' indicates weak morpheme awareness and difficulty decoding inflectional suffixes that signal grammatical meaning.
Question 3: What does the Hasbrouck and Tindal oral reading fluency norms primarily measure?
- Reading comprehension percentile scores
- Words correct per minute benchmarks by grade and time of year (Correct answer)
- Phonemic awareness developmental milestones
- Silent reading rate for expository texts
Correct answer: Words correct per minute benchmarks by grade and time of year
Hasbrouck and Tindal norms provide words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) benchmarks for grades 1–8 at fall, winter, and spring assessment points.
Question 4: The Ehri phase model suggests that a reader who uses full alphabetic mapping for every phoneme-grapheme correspondence is in which phase?
- Pre-alphabetic
- Partial alphabetic
- Full alphabetic (Correct answer)
- Consolidated alphabetic
Correct answer: Full alphabetic
The full alphabetic phase is characterized by using complete phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode unfamiliar words.
Question 5: Which error pattern most strongly signals a deficit in orthographic mapping rather than phonological decoding?
- Sounding out each phoneme slowly but accurately
- Substituting visually similar words (e.g., 'horse' for 'house') (Correct answer)
- Skipping unknown multisyllabic words entirely
- Reversing letter order in nonsense words
Correct answer: Substituting visually similar words (e.g., 'horse' for 'house')
Substituting visually similar whole words suggests the reader is relying on visual gestalt rather than mapping phonemes to graphemes for storage in memory.
Question 6: Which syllable type contains a vowel followed by a consonant and then a silent 'e' at the end of the syllable?
- Closed syllable
- Open syllable
- Vowel-consonant-e (magic e) syllable (Correct answer)
- R-controlled syllable
Correct answer: Vowel-consonant-e (magic e) syllable
The vowel-consonant-e syllable pattern (e.g., 'cake') has a long vowel sound produced by the silent final 'e'.
Question 7: A student reads 98% of words correctly but at 60 WCPM (well below grade-level norms). The most appropriate instructional target is:
- Phonemic awareness at the isolation level
- Reading fluency through rate-building practice on independent-level texts (Correct answer)
- Phonics instruction for vowel teams
- Comprehension strategy instruction for inferencing
Correct answer: Reading fluency through rate-building practice on independent-level texts
High accuracy with low rate indicates a fluency deficit; rate-building practice using texts the student can read accurately is the appropriate intervention.
CALT CALT Reading Fluency and Decoding Development 4
Which approach best describes 'repeated reading' as an instructional fluency technique?