ELAR Foundations of Reading 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which of the following best describes a 'digraph'?
- Two vowels that each make their own sound
- Two letters that together represent a single sound (Correct answer)
- A syllable with two consonants at the end
- A word with two morphemes
Correct answer: Two letters that together represent a single sound
A digraph is two letters (consonants or vowels) that combine to represent one sound, such as 'ch,' 'sh,' or 'th.'
Question 2: What is the key characteristic of an 'open syllable'?
- It ends in a vowel and the vowel is typically long (Correct answer)
- It ends in a consonant and the vowel is short
- It contains a silent letter
- It has two vowels working together
Correct answer: It ends in a vowel and the vowel is typically long
An open syllable ends in a vowel, which is typically long, as in the syllable 'go' or the first syllable of 'robot.'
Question 3: Which of the following words contains a consonant blend?
- chair
- phone
- street (Correct answer)
- thank
Correct answer: street
A consonant blend consists of two or more consonants where each letter retains its own sound; 'str-' in 'street' is a three-letter blend.
Question 4: A teacher uses Elkonin boxes (sound boxes) during a phonics lesson. What is the main instructional purpose?
- To help students identify syllable types in multisyllabic words
- To help students segment spoken words into individual phonemes (Correct answer)
- To teach students to identify rhyming words
- To help students understand sentence structure
Correct answer: To help students segment spoken words into individual phonemes
Elkonin boxes are a visual tool where students push tokens into boxes for each phoneme, supporting phoneme segmentation.
Question 5: Which statement best describes the relationship between oral vocabulary and reading comprehension?
- Oral vocabulary has no effect on reading comprehension once decoding is mastered
- A larger oral vocabulary supports reading comprehension because readers understand more words they decode (Correct answer)
- Reading comprehension develops before oral vocabulary in typical language learners
- Oral vocabulary only matters for listening, not reading
Correct answer: A larger oral vocabulary supports reading comprehension because readers understand more words they decode
Oral vocabulary knowledge strongly predicts reading comprehension because readers must understand word meanings to comprehend text.
Question 6: When a student reads 'the dog ran fast' as 'the dog runs fast,' this miscue is best described as:
- A meaning-change error with no grammatical disruption
- A grammatically acceptable substitution that preserves meaning (Correct answer)
- A phonological reversal error
- A vocabulary substitution error
Correct answer: A grammatically acceptable substitution that preserves meaning
Substituting 'runs' for 'ran' is grammatically acceptable and preserves overall meaning, indicating strong syntactic and semantic cueing despite a tense error.
Question 7: Which of the following is an example of a derivational suffix?
- -s (as in 'cats')
- -ed (as in 'jumped')
- -er (comparative, as in 'faster')
- -tion (as in 'invention') (Correct answer)
Correct answer: -tion (as in 'invention')
The suffix '-tion' is a derivational suffix that changes a verb ('invent') into a noun ('invention'), altering the word's part of speech.
ELAR Foundations of Reading 5
Which of the following best describes a 'digraph'?