CALT Reading Comprehension 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which instructional strategy best supports students who struggle to monitor their own understanding while reading?
- Repeated oral reading drills
- Think-alouds and metacognitive self-questioning (Correct answer)
- Increased decodable text exposure
- Morpheme analysis drills
Correct answer: Think-alouds and metacognitive self-questioning
Think-alouds and self-questioning teach students to actively monitor comprehension and notice when meaning breaks down.
Question 2: A student can answer literal questions but fails when asked 'Why did the character feel that way?' This gap reflects difficulty with which comprehension skill?
- Literal recall
- Perspective-taking and inferencing about mental states (Correct answer)
- Decoding multisyllabic words
- Identifying main idea sentences
Correct answer: Perspective-taking and inferencing about mental states
Questions about character feelings require theory of mind and inferencing skills that go beyond literal text recall.
Question 3: Which evidence-based intervention framework emphasizes explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies such as predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing?
- Orton-Gillingham approach
- Reciprocal Teaching (Correct answer)
- Wilson Reading System
- RAVE-O program
Correct answer: Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) teaches four specific comprehension strategies through dialogue between teacher and students.
Question 4: When assessing reading comprehension, a CALT notes that a student performs significantly better on oral comprehension than on reading comprehension. This pattern most directly points to a deficit in:
- Language comprehension
- Decoding and word recognition (Correct answer)
- Vocabulary breadth
- Pragmatic language
Correct answer: Decoding and word recognition
Better oral than reading comprehension indicates that language processing is intact and the bottleneck is at the word-reading (decoding) level.
Question 5: Which text feature primarily helps readers understand the organizational structure and hierarchy of information in expository text?
- Rhyme scheme
- Headings and subheadings (Correct answer)
- Dialogue tags
- Story grammar elements
Correct answer: Headings and subheadings
Headings and subheadings signal how ideas are organized and allow readers to anticipate and chunk informational content.
Question 6: A CALT teaches a student to identify the 'somebody-wanted-but-so-then' structure. Which type of text does this strategy target?
- Expository informational text
- Procedural text
- Narrative text (Correct answer)
- Persuasive text
Correct answer: Narrative text
The somebody-wanted-but-so-then framework maps onto narrative story grammar (character, goal, conflict, resolution, outcome).
Question 7: Background knowledge contributes to reading comprehension primarily by:
- Improving phonological memory capacity
- Providing schema that aids inference generation and fill gaps in text (Correct answer)
- Reducing the need for explicit vocabulary instruction
- Speeding letter-level visual processing
Correct answer: Providing schema that aids inference generation and fill gaps in text
Prior knowledge creates schemata that help readers make inferences, connect ideas, and fill in information the text leaves implicit.
CALT Reading Comprehension 5
Which instructional strategy best supports students who struggle to monitor their own understanding while reading?