ELAR Foundations of Reading Instruction 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A teacher notices a student reads 'ship' as 'chip'. Which phonological skill is the student struggling with?
- Phoneme segmentation
- Phoneme substitution (Correct answer)
- Phoneme blending
- Phoneme isolation
Correct answer: Phoneme substitution
Phoneme substitution is the ability to replace one phoneme with another, which is what the student fails to do correctly with the initial consonant blend.
Question 2: Which assessment best measures a student's orthographic knowledge?
- Rapid automatized naming (RAN)
- Phoneme segmentation fluency
- Spelling inventory or word sort task (Correct answer)
- Oral reading fluency passage
Correct answer: Spelling inventory or word sort task
Spelling inventories and word sort tasks reveal how well students understand letter patterns and spelling conventions, which reflects orthographic knowledge.
Question 3: According to the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is the product of:
- Decoding and fluency
- Language comprehension and decoding (Correct answer)
- Vocabulary and background knowledge
- Phonemic awareness and syntax
Correct answer: Language comprehension and decoding
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) defines reading comprehension as the product of decoding ability and language comprehension.
Question 4: A student can blend and segment phonemes but still struggles to read words. What is the most likely next instructional focus?
- Increasing sight word memorization
- Teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondences (Correct answer)
- Practicing oral language retelling
- Building background knowledge
Correct answer: Teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondences
Phoneme-grapheme correspondence instruction bridges phonological awareness skills to actual decoding by connecting sounds to their written representations.
Question 5: Which type of text structure would a teacher address when teaching students to identify cause-and-effect relationships in expository text?
- Narrative structure
- Description structure
- Sequence structure
- Causal structure (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Causal structure
Causal (cause-and-effect) text structure organizes information around why events happen and what results from them, which is the focus of this instruction.
Question 6: What does 'morphological awareness' primarily involve?
- Understanding how sounds map to letters
- Recognizing and manipulating meaningful word parts (Correct answer)
- Reading words accurately at an automatic rate
- Comprehending figurative language in text
Correct answer: Recognizing and manipulating meaningful word parts
Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize and use morphemes — prefixes, suffixes, roots — to understand and decode words.
Question 7: A teacher groups students by similar spelling errors for targeted word study. This practice is best described as:
- Differentiated phonics instruction based on assessment data (Correct answer)
- Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
- Tier 1 whole-class fluency practice
- Guided reading level grouping
Correct answer: Differentiated phonics instruction based on assessment data
Using spelling error patterns from assessment data to form flexible instructional groups is a hallmark of differentiated, data-driven phonics instruction.
ELAR Foundations of Reading Instruction 2
A teacher notices a student reads 'ship' as 'chip'.
Which phonological skill is the student struggling with?