RICA Subtest 3

A fourth-grade student who reads grade level narrative texts with fluency and excellent comprehension is struggling to read aloud a grade level content area passage about a topic with which the student is familiar. The student reads the passage hesitantly, frequently stopping to reread clauses or entire sentences. Afterward, the student demonstrates limited comprehension of what was read. Which of the following factors is most likely disrupting the student's fluent reading of this text?

• insufficient background knowledge to support basic comprehension of the text

• lack of experience with the academic language structures used in the text

• insufficient monitoring of comprehension while reading the text

• lack of grade level word analysis skills for accurate decoding of the words in the text

Which of the following instructional activities would best help upper elementary English Learners develop intonations and rhythms of the English language to support fluent reading?

• leading a class discussion on an age-appropriate topic, then having each student read aloud a section of a text that is written about the same topic

• having the students record their own oral reading of a passage and then listen to the recording while silently rereading the passage

• giving an expressive oral reading of a short text, then having the students echo read the text as the teacher reads it aloud again

• encouraging the students to practice reading aloud a text in which stressed words and punctuation marks are highlighted

A second-grade teacher would like to plan an activity to improve the reading rate of two students who read at about the same rate and level and are both automatic readers. Which of the following activities would best address the students’ needs?

• a. a cooperative silent reading activity, in which the students read the same passage together silently, stopping periodically to share their understanding of the text

• b. a repeated reading activity, in which each student takes several turns reading aloud a decodable passage to the other student while the other student follows along silently

• c. a paired reading activity, in which the students sit side by side and read a shared text aloud in unison, gradually increasing their pace as they proceed through the text

• d. a timed partner reading activity, in which the students take turns silently reading a shared text for one minute while the other student keeps time and says when to stop

A second grader has demonstrated the ability to decode individual words accurately, but she reads very slowly and laboriously. When the teacher tries to engage the student in oral reading activities, she says she feels “embarrassed” and would rather read silently. Which of the following modifications to instruction would be most appropriate and effective for helping this student improve her reading fluency?

• a. encouraging her to serve as an “audience” for other students’ oral reading until she demonstrates willingness to read aloud herself

• b. having her reread a text several times using whisper reading to build her fluency and confidence with respect to the text

• c. teaching her how to use self-monitoring as she reads to improve her literal comprehension and ability to read with prosody

• d. providing her with explicit phonics instruction to improve her word identification skills before requiring her to read aloud

Lately, when choosing a book to read, a third grader who reads at grade level always selects books from a series that is written in a very formulaic style that does little to extend his conceptual oral language development. The teacher’s best response to this behavior would be to:

• - a. avoid interfering with the student’s selection of books as long as he finds his choices enjoyable

• - b. provide the student with books with similar themes or on similar topics that are more challenging for him

• c. point out to the student some of the major limitations of the book he is choosing to read and ask him not to read those books at school

• d. advise the student that he should choose books that will prepare him for the more difficult reading he will encounter in fourth grade

Which of the following statements best explains an important limitation of teaching students to rely on context as their primary strategy for determining meaning of unfamiliar words?

• context clues have limited usefulness for students who already have well developed background knowledge related to a text’s subject or content

• using context to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word disrupts students reading fluency more significantly than simply consulting a dictionary

• - c. explicit context clues about a word’s meaning are not very common in most texts, while implicit contextual clues often require students to apply background knowledge they lack

• d. overreliance on context as a word learning strategy hinders students’ vocabulary growth, since they should be learning most new words in direct vocabulary instruction

A second-grade student has limited vocabulary knowledge, which hinders the students’ word recognition and reading comprehension. The student’s oral reading is slow and labored, and the students typically spends the majority of independent reading time browsing through books, making little effort to read the actual words on the page. Research has shown that which of the following is most likely to happen if this student receives no instructional intervention?

• the student will always be behind average performing peers but will achieve an adequate reading level to be academically successful

• the student will naturally begin to show more interest and proficiency in reading as the student matures and will catch up with average performing peers in third grade

• the student will remain approximately at a second-grade reading level and will not be able to progress beyond this level

• the student will begin to fall behind peers in reading development and will continue to fall further behind in later grades as texts include increasingly difficult vocabulary

A fifth-grade teacher is planning a multidisciplinary unit on water pollution. For this unit, students will read chapters from their social studies and science textbooks as well as relevant fictional narratives. These materials will also be incorporated into a variety of instructional activities designed to promote students’ reading development. Which of the following statements best describes an important advantage of using a cross curricular approach such as this unit to promote students’ reading development?

• interdisciplinary reading instruction provides more opportunities for teachers to tailor teaching strategies to the needs of individual students

• reading instruction that focuses on both literature and content area texts helps students recognize and understand differences between written and oral English

• interdisciplinary reading instruction motivates students to apply a variety of word identification strategies to clarify the meaning of texts

• reading instruction that integrates a variety of related texts promotes deep processing of new vocabulary through multiple exposures to key words and concepts

A middle school teacher writes the morpheme dict on the board, pronounces it, and explains that dict derives from the Latin word for “speak”. The teacher then asks students if they can think of English words that start with or include dict. The teacher uses the students’ suggestions to create a diagram. (e.g. benediction, dictionary, dictator, predict, contradict) This activity is likely to promote students’ vocabulary development primarily by helping the students:

• recognize common prefixes and suffixes

• learn the techniques of concept mapping

• - c. apply knowledge of word roots as a word learning strategy

• - d. draw on a knowledge of phonics to unlock word meanings

A teacher substitutes blank spaces for several nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in an appropriate level text and asks students to determine reasonable and logical words to complete each blank. This technique is useful as an informal assessment of students’ understanding of English language structures primarily because it requires them to:

• define various grammatical categories in their own words

• select appropriate words based on their grammatical function as well as on their meaning

• group words into grammatical categories to clarify their meaning

• draw on grammatical knowledge to identify the subjects and predicates of complex sentences