CALT Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield CALT facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. The ultimate goal of teaching decoding and spelling skills to automaticity in an MSL program is to: → free up cognitive resources for reading comprehension.
2. Which of the following best describes 'connected text reading' as used in CALT lessons? → Reading sentences and passages that contain only phoneme-grapheme patterns already taught
3. Which historical figures developed the original multisensory approach to reading instruction for students with dyslexia? → Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham
4. Morphosyntax refers to the intersection of: → Morphology meaning word structure and syntax meaning sentence structure
5. A CALT is working with a student on reading multisyllabic words by breaking them into syllables. This strategy is called: → Syllabication or syllable division
6. Educational therapy differs from tutoring primarily because it: → Addresses underlying cognitive and processing deficits that interfere with learning
7. Understanding complex inverted conditional sentences such as Had she studied she would have passed the test requires: → Advanced syntactic knowledge of inverted conditional constructions
8. The word autobiography can be fully analyzed as: → auto meaning self, bio meaning life, graph meaning write, and -y as a noun suffix
9. Which pair of words best illustrates the difference between a closed syllable and an open syllable? → go / got
10. The inference reading strategy requires readers to: → Use background knowledge and text clues to understand information not directly stated
11. Which is a key feature of evidence-based educational therapy for dyslexia? → Explicit, cumulative, and systematic instruction
12. An academic language therapist uses informal assessments, such as observing a student read a list of nonsense words, primarily to: → Guide daily instructional decisions and monitor progress on specific skills.
13. The task asking a student to say sunlight and then say it without sun assesses: → Syllable deletion
14. In the word 'unbelievably', which of the following is the base word or free morpheme? → believe
15. Sentence combining is an instructional technique used to: → Develop syntactic maturity by joining simple sentences into more complex ones
16. In a structured lesson, what is the purpose of the auditory drill component? → To build rapid, automatic recall of graphemes when phonemes are presented aloud
17. Which principle is foundational to Academic Language Therapy for students with dyslexia? → Multisensory structured language instruction
18. Which of the following is the best definition of a dependent clause? → A group of words with a subject and a verb that cannot stand alone as a sentence.
19. Which technique involves a student simultaneously saying each letter, writing it, and then reading the completed word? → Simultaneous Oral Spelling
20. The principle of overlearning in MSL education serves to: → Ensure skills become automatic and can be recalled without conscious effort
21. A student learns the prefix un- meaning not and encounters unhappy. Applying morphological knowledge, they determine the word means: → Not happy
22. Which standardized assessment is commonly used to evaluate phonological processing in students suspected of having dyslexia? → Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP-2)
23. The MSL principle of sequential instruction means that content is taught: → From simpler to more complex, in a carefully designed developmental order
24. Magnocellular deficit theory proposes that some individuals with dyslexia have difficulty with: → Processing rapid visual and auditory temporal information
25. The IDA's definition of structured literacy specifies that it must be all of the following except: → Discovery-based
26. Teaching students the Greek root graph meaning write and the prefix bio meaning life allows them to decode biography as: → A written account of someone's life
27. A CALT is teaching a student the Latin root 'scrib/script.' Which word group best demonstrates application of this root? → Transcript, describe, scripture, scribble
28. Which professional would most appropriately collaborate with a CALT when a student also presents with significant oral language delays? → Speech-language pathologist
29. Which of the following is a compound sentence? → The dog barked, and the cat ran away.
30. Which text structure is most appropriate for a student writing about the sequence of events in a historical period? → Sequential/chronological