CALT Academic Language Therapy 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A student struggles to hold a sequence of phonemes in memory while blending them into a word. This deficit most directly implicates:
- Long-term semantic memory
- Phonological working memory (Correct answer)
- Episodic buffer capacity
- Executive attention networks
Correct answer: Phonological working memory
Holding and manipulating phoneme sequences during blending relies on phonological working memory, a core deficit in many students with dyslexia.
Question 2: Which assessment tool is a standardized diagnostic instrument specifically designed to assess phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming?
- Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT)
- Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) (Correct answer)
- Gray Oral Reading Tests (GORT)
- Test of Written Language (TOWL)
Correct answer: Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP)
The CTOPP is the primary standardized tool measuring phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming across age groups.
Question 3: When teaching spelling using the CALT approach, which step typically comes FIRST in a structured lesson plan?
- Dictation of sentences
- Introduction of a new phonogram or rule
- Review of previously learned phonograms (Correct answer)
- Morphology drill with prefixes and suffixes
Correct answer: Review of previously learned phonograms
Structured literacy lessons begin with review of previously learned material before introducing new content, reinforcing automaticity through cumulative practice.
Question 4: A student decodes accurately but reads word-by-word with no expression. The MOST appropriate intervention target is:
- Phoneme segmentation accuracy
- Reading fluency and prosody (Correct answer)
- Vocabulary breadth
- Comprehension monitoring strategies
Correct answer: Reading fluency and prosody
Word-by-word reading without expression indicates a fluency deficit; prosody instruction helps bridge accurate decoding and fluent, meaningful reading.
Question 5: Which morpheme type changes the grammatical function of a word, such as turning a verb into a noun?
- Inflectional morpheme
- Free morpheme
- Derivational morpheme (Correct answer)
- Bound base morpheme
Correct answer: Derivational morpheme
Derivational morphemes change word class or meaning, such as adding '-tion' to 'act' to create the noun 'action.'
Question 6: Which of the following best describes the purpose of an error analysis in academic language therapy?
- To calculate a standardized score for eligibility determination
- To identify consistent patterns that reveal the student's underlying processing breakdowns (Correct answer)
- To compare the student's performance to same-age peers nationally
- To document the number of errors made across a reading passage
Correct answer: To identify consistent patterns that reveal the student's underlying processing breakdowns
Error analysis identifies systematic patterns in student mistakes that reveal specific phonological, orthographic, or morphological processing weaknesses to target in instruction.
Question 7: A therapist is teaching a student to recognize that the suffix '-ed' can represent three different sounds (/t/, /d/, /ɪd/). This instruction primarily targets:
- Phonological awareness at the phoneme level
- Morphophonological knowledge (Correct answer)
- Syllable division rules
- Semantic mapping strategies
Correct answer: Morphophonological knowledge
Understanding how a morpheme's pronunciation varies by phonological context is morphophonological knowledge, bridging morphology and phonology.
CALT Academic Language Therapy 5
A student struggles to hold a sequence of phonemes in memory while blending them into a word.
This deficit most directly implicates: