CALT Reading Fluency and Decoding Development Flashcards

A student reads 'phoneme' as /ˈfoʊnɛm/ with correct prosody and no hesitation but cannot segment it into individual phonemes when asked. Which decoding phenomenon best explains this dissociation?

Answer: Orthographic mapping has occurred for the word as a whole unit without full phonemic awareness integration

Orthographic mapping (Ehri's theory) allows words to be stored in long-term memory as mapped units — the student has bonded the written form to its pronunciation without having fully analyzed the phoneme sequence consciously. This is why fluent reading of a word can precede the ability to explicitly segment it, especially in students who learned the word as a whole before receiving structured phonemic awareness instruction.

When assessing oral reading fluency using a DIBELS-style CBM probe, a CALT notices a student substitutes morphologically related words (e.g., reads 'running' for 'runner') without self-correcting. This error pattern is MOST indicative of which reading profile?

Answer: A student over-relying on contextual prediction while under-attending to the full grapheme sequence

Substituting morphologically related words without self-correction reflects a top-down reading strategy where the student uses partial graphophonic cues plus semantic/syntactic prediction rather than fully processing the complete grapheme string. This pattern is associated with readers who have not yet fully automatized decoding and rely heavily on context — a hallmark finding that guides intervention toward strengthening full graphophonemic processing.

According to the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading, a student who reads 'yacht' correctly on first exposure but cannot decode 'yatch' (a pronounceable nonword) is MOST likely demonstrating a selective impairment in which route?

Answer: The non-lexical (sublexical phonological) route

In the DRC model, irregular words like 'yacht' are read via the lexical route (accessing stored whole-word representations), while nonwords like 'yatch' require the non-lexical sublexical route that applies grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. A student who succeeds with the irregular real word but fails with the pronounceable nonword has an intact lexical route but impaired non-lexical route — consistent with a phonological dyslexia profile.

A CALT is designing fluency instruction for a student who scores at the 50th percentile on WCPM but at the 15th percentile on prosody rating scales, with normal comprehension scores. Which intervention approach is MOST precisely targeted to this student's deficit profile?

Answer: Repeated reading with explicit modeling and feedback focused on phrasing, intonation, and punctuation-driven pausing

This student's WCPM is adequate (50th percentile) but prosody is deficient — a dissociation that indicates the rate problem is not the target; instead, the intervention must address the suprasegmental features of reading: phrasing, expression, and prosodic contour. Repeated reading with explicit prosody modeling and feedback directly addresses this. NIM and decodable text approaches target rate and accuracy, not prosody specifically.

In Chall's Stages of Reading Development, the transition from Stage 2 (Confirmation and Fluency) to Stage 3 (Reading for Learning) is characterized by a shift in which cognitive demand?

Answer: From consolidating decoding automaticity using familiar texts to using reading as a tool for acquiring new knowledge from unfamiliar content

Chall's Stage 2 is characterized by reading practice with familiar, controlled texts to build fluency and confirm the alphabetic principle — the primary cognitive demand is automatizing decoding. Stage 3 marks the shift to 'reading to learn,' where texts introduce new, unfamiliar concepts and reading becomes a vehicle for knowledge acquisition. This transition requires not just decoding fluency but vocabulary depth and background knowledge sufficient to process novel content.

A 4th-grade student with dyslexia demonstrates adequate phoneme segmentation on CVC words but breaks down consistently on consonant cluster reduction (e.g., deletes /s/ from /str/ blends when both decoding and spelling). The MOST theoretically precise explanation for this pattern involves which phonological construct?

Answer: Incomplete acquisition of the sonority sequencing principle governing permissible onset cluster structures in English

The sonority sequencing principle (SSP) specifies that phonemes within syllable onset clusters must rise in sonority from left to right toward the nucleus. English onset clusters like /str/ follow a sonority hierarchy: /s/ (fricative) + /t/ (stop) + /r/ (liquid). Students with dyslexia frequently have underspecified or fragile representations of complex onsets, particularly three-phoneme clusters, reflecting incomplete internalization of the SSP — not simply a working memory overload, which would predict more variable and generalized errors.