Utah Foundations of Reading Certification Test Practice Tests and PDFs

Reciprocal teaching is an activity in which students gradually take over the role of the teacher in small groups to discuss texts. The students lead discussions focused on four main reading strategies: summarizing, questioning, predicting, and clarifying. The remaining options are also reading strategies, but they are not typically the focus of reciprocal teaching activities.

The CALLA is a content-based approach to language instruction that integrates academic learning strategies that students require to participate in mainstream English-speaking classrooms. It includes objectives for content (a), language (b), and learning strategies (c), and it allows teachers to plan lessons using content based on themes or formats using sheltered content (d).

Incidental exposure to implicit phonics (A) is found to be much less effective than systematic, explicit direct phonics instruction (B) in helping young children understand sound-to-letter correspondences and decode words. In addition to teaching phonics directly, explicitly, and systematically, another practice that helps young children understand and use phonics to decode words is giving them reading and writing activities that apply phonics principles.

If a young child cannot break down a word into its component phonemes, this represents a deficit in phonological and/or phonemic awareness, which will cause reading difficulties. Likewise, the inability to do the reverse and blend individual phonemes to form words (C) is a sign the child will have trouble reading. Young children with good phonological and phonemic awareness can both identify and form rhymes (A). To learn to read well, they should also be able to count the syllables in a word and use phonetic spellings (by sound) for new/unfamiliar words (D).

A glossary contains an alphabetized list of important vocabulary words found in a text, along with their meanings. It is similar to a dictionary. It would be the most helpful text feature for a student to use to determine the meanings of the content-related vocabulary words in the text. The table of contents helps the reader identify which pages contain which topics in the text. Headings help the reader determine the main idea of each section of the text. The index is an alphabetized list of topics in the text, along with the page numbers on which they can be found.

According to accepted educational measurement principles, teachers should design tests to measure ALL their learning objectives (including through a combination of tests), not just a few (A). While tests' primary uses are diagnosis or evaluation, another principle is that an important additional use is instructional by enabling teachers to identify and re-teach important information students have missed, stimulate additional topic discussions, and integrate instruction and evaluation. Criterion-referenced tests measure achievement relative to preset criteria; norm- referenced tests enable group comparisons (C). Test validity and reliability are both equally necessary (D).

Research finds one helpful instructional strategy for ELL student language acquisition is to have them explain and/or retell what the teacher just said to their classmates. This not only ensures their comprehension, it also gives them practice analyzing the English they hear, restating/paraphrasing English, and communicating to others in spoken English. Teachers should incorporate visual aids: studies show supplementing verbal input visually helps ELLS understand concepts in subject content areas as they are learning a foreign language. Research finds that students cannot grasp abstract concepts as readily in a foreign language, so teachers should give the concrete objects, pictures, and the like to illustrate and demonstrate ideas as students gradually transition from concrete to abstract in a new language. Teachers can arrange for ELLS to signal when they don't understand; they also closely observe ELLS, and if they do not indicate or demonstrate understanding. should elaborate by summarizing, paraphrasing. and giving synonyms.

Although the names of the stages vary, readers generally progress through four stages of reading development: emergent reading, early reading, transitional reading. and fluent reading. Transitional readers use multiple cueing systems and knowledge of complex spelling patterns to decode many words easily, and they begin to read complex texts that cover a range of genres and topics. These texts contain more complex vocabulary, so it is beneficial for students to analyze word morphology' to determine the meanings of unknown words. Transitional readers already know a large number of sight words automatically and use letter/sound relationships to decode words. Identifying the theme of abstract texts is more difficult, and would likely be more appropriate for readers in the fluent stage.

While there is no consensus among experts as to any universal sequence of instruction for teaching the alphabetic principle through phonics instruction, they do agree that, to enable children to start reading words as soon as possible, the highest-utility relationships should be introduced earliest. For example, the letters m, a, p, t, and s are all used frequently, whereas the x in box, the sound Obey in they, and the letter a when pronounced as it is in want have lower-utility letter-sound correspondences. Important considerations for the alphabetic principle are to teach letter-sound correspondences in isolation, not in word contexts; to teach them explicitly; to give students opportunities to practice letter-sound relationships within their other daily lessons, not only separately: and to include cumulative reviews of relationships taught earlier along with new ones in practice opportunities.

A word wall uses visual illustrations of vocabulary words and the concepts they represent, and includes additional words, concepts, and pictures related to the main words and pictures to enrich vocabulary and relational thinking. The teacher would be most responsible for creating the word wall, using it in lessons/activities, and instructing/assisting young children in its use. The children themselves can and will repeatedly sing the same familiar song (A) and repeat the same rhymes and chants (B), which enhance vocabulary development for both native English-speaking and ESL students. Stories (C) may be read live by teachers, or readings may be recorded. Either way, the children play the same role of listening to repeated readings.