CALT Reading Fluency and Decoding Development Flashcards

A student with dyslexia demonstrates accurate but extremely slow decoding of multisyllabic words even after extensive phonics instruction. Assessment reveals strong phonemic awareness and solid letter-sound knowledge. Which explanation BEST accounts for this persistent fluency deficit?

Answer: The student has not yet automatized orthographic mappings at the morpheme and syllable level, preventing sublexical chunking during decoding

When decoding is accurate but slow despite solid phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge, the bottleneck lies in the failure to build automatized orthographic representations at larger grain sizes (syllable and morpheme patterns). Skilled readers chunk multisyllabic words into familiar sublexical units rather than decoding phoneme by phoneme. Without those automatic orthographic mappings, each word demands effortful sequential processing, suppressing fluency even when accuracy is intact.

According to Ehri's phases of word reading development, a student who reads 'elephant' correctly in a decodable text but fails to recognize it in isolation two days later is MOST likely operating in which phase?

Answer: Full alphabetic phase

In the full alphabetic phase, readers use complete letter-sound mappings to decode words accurately, but orthographic representations are not yet fully consolidated in long-term memory. The student can decode 'elephant' using phonics knowledge in context, but without enough repeated exposures, the word's orthographic image is not yet stored as a sight word, causing failure on isolated recognition. Consolidated alphabetic phase readers would have retained it as an automatic sight word after fewer exposures.

A CALT is analyzing a student's oral reading fluency data and notices that prosody scores are significantly below age expectations even though rate (WCPM) has reached grade-level norms. Which of the following is the MOST clinically significant implication of this profile?

Answer: The student may have automatized word recognition through compensatory strategies without developing robust meaning-based processing during reading

Prosody reflects the reader's integration of syntactic and semantic information into expression — it is a marker of reading-for-meaning, not just rapid word calling. A student who reaches normative WCPM but shows flat, monotone prosody may be 'word calling': rapidly decoding without constructing a mental model of text meaning. This dissociation between rate and prosody is a red flag for comprehension deficits that rate alone would mask, and it signals the need for continued intervention targeting reading-with-understanding.

The Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading posits two pathways for word recognition. Which clinical scenario MOST specifically implicates impairment of the lexical-semantic route while the sublexical route remains relatively intact?

Answer: A student who reads nonwords accurately but regularizes exception words (e.g., reads 'yacht' as /jækt/)

In the DRC model, the sublexical (phonological) route applies grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules and is used for nonwords and regular words. The lexical-semantic route retrieves whole-word pronunciations stored in the orthographic lexicon, including irregular exception words whose pronunciation cannot be derived by GPC rules alone. A student who reads pseudowords accurately (intact sublexical route) but regularizes exception words — applying GPC rules to words like 'yacht' or 'colonel' — shows surface dyslexia, indicating impaired lexical access with preserved phonological decoding.

Research on the 'orthographic depth hypothesis' has direct implications for CALT practice when working with bilingual students. A Spanish-English bilingual student who is a fluent reader in Spanish but struggles significantly with English decoding fluency MOST likely demonstrates which pattern?

Answer: Greater automaticity in sublexical processing in Spanish due to consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, with slower chunking strategies insufficient for English's deeper orthographic irregularity

Spanish is a shallow (transparent) orthography with highly consistent, one-to-one grapheme-phoneme mappings. Readers of shallow orthographies develop fast, reliable sublexical decoding strategies. English is a deep orthography with many irregular, inconsistent mappings that require readers to rely more heavily on the lexical route and orthographic memory of whole-word patterns. A student who has automatized decoding in Spanish's transparent system may apply those same sequential GPC strategies to English — which are insufficient for exception words and multisyllabic words — causing fluency deficits even when phonological skills are sound.

A CALT measures a 4th-grade student's reading fluency using three one-minute probes and finds scores of 112, 89, and 107 WCPM. The student scores at the 50th percentile on a norm-referenced phonological decoding measure. When interpreting these data for an IEP team, which statement MOST accurately reflects the clinical picture?

Answer: The variability across probes (range of 23 WCPM) suggests passage difficulty effects and warrants readability-controlled re-assessment before drawing conclusions about fluency deficits

A 23-WCPM range across three probes is clinically meaningful and may reflect uncontrolled differences in passage readability, text familiarity, or passage length rather than true fluency variability. Best practice in CBM-based fluency assessment requires use of readability-controlled, equivalent alternate forms; without this control, score variance confounds interpretation. Additionally, a 50th-percentile phonological decoding score does not confirm a phonological basis for fluency difficulties — it suggests phonological decoding is average, meaning fluency weaknesses may reflect orthographic automaticity, rate-of-processing, or other factors. Averaging three inequivalent probes or selecting the highest score are both psychometrically inappropriate.