RICA Subtest 1

During which of the following stages of spelling development do students typically begin to show an understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds?

• precommunicative

• semiphonetic

• phonetic

• transitional

When planning differentiated fluency instruction for individual students, independent silent reading should be limited to students who:

• have already acquired automaticity.

• are struggling with comprehension.

• prefer reading aloud to themselves.

• are advanced in their reading skills.

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 factor 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

A third-grade student who is an advanced learner has already demonstrated mastery of the derivational suffixes -ness and -ment. Which strategy for differentiating instruction for this lesson would be most appropriate for this student?

• having the student work on inflectional suffixes

• teaching the student the content planned for the following lesson

• encouraging the student to engage in independent silent reading

• introducing the student to higher-level derivational suffixes

Which instructional activity best helps 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.

An emergent reader frequently reverses some letters and numbers during writing tasks. Which strategy would be most effective in helping this student develop more accurate letter formation skills?

• Providing the student with supplemental practice writing lists of words that are spelled with the target letters

• Having the student practice tracing the target letter shapes with a finger while saying aloud the sequence of steps to form each letter

• Providing the student with a supplemental handwriting workbook that describes the formation of the target letters in a series of steps

• Encouraging the student to vocalize words when writing, especially when the words contain the target letters.

Which of the following informal assessments would be most appropriate to use to assess an individual student's phonemic awareness?

• asking the student to identify the sound at the beginning, middle, or end of a spoken word (e.g., "What sound do you hear at the end of step?")

• having the student listen to a tape-recorded story while looking at the book and then answer several simple questions about the story

• asking the student to identify the letters in the alphabet that correspond to the initial consonant sounds of several familiar spoken words

• having the student listen to the teacher read aloud a set of words with the same beginning sound (e.g., train, trap, trouble)

When reading aloud texts, a second-grade English Learner often makes errors in pronunciation that are unrelated to her ability to accurately decode the words. The teacher's best response would be:

• Ignore the errors and focus on fluency.

• Analyze the student's pronunciation patterns and plan an intervention to address difficulties that may affect her reading comprehension.

• Encourage the student to read more books independently.

• Provide the student with a list of words to practice pronunciation.

A sixth-grade teacher observes that several students have misspelled the word pasteurize. After writing pasteurize and Louis Pasteur on the board, the teacher explains how Pasteur invented the process of pasteurization. Students then discuss how the word Pasteur relates to the word pasteurize. This instructional activity fosters students' reading and writing development primarily by:

• helping them learn to use etymology to improve spelling and decoding of multisyllabic words.

• encouraging them to memorize the spelling of difficult words.

• teaching them the history of scientific discoveries.

• focusing on phonics to enhance their reading skills.

Which approach is most effective for first-grade students with decoding skills to learn to decode words ending in -ing?

• explicitly teaching the students to read the unit -ing in isolation before teaching them to decode familiar words that end in the inflection.

• using think-aloud during guided reading to model decoding strategies.

• having students practice reading word lists with -ing in isolation without context.

• teaching -ing in the context of open and closed syllables without prior knowledge of the unit.