FREE CTEL Language and Language Development Questions and Answers

Question 1

A group of elementary school students who are learning English at the starting level have trouble pronouncing a specific phoneme.
Which of the following approaches is most likely to be the best starting point for dealing with the kids' difficulty?

Accepted Answer

using meaningful minimal pair activities, such as rhyming words in poems and songs, to develop the students' ability to identify and produce the phoneme in the context of whole words

Answer

repeating the phoneme several times while pointing to its corresponding letter(s) on an alphabet chart to prompt the students to associate the phoneme with its most common graphic representation(s)

Answer

using an illustration or model of a human mouth to point out to the students the specific parts of the mouth and point of articulation involved in producing the phoneme

Answer

reading aloud meaningful connected discourse, such as dialogues and stories that contain instances of the phoneme, to expose the students implicitly to the phoneme in the context of whole paragraphs

Question 2

A high school frequently funds and advertises multicultural activities and events. Which of the following outcomes for English language learners at the school is most likely to result from this factor?

Accepted Answer

It will tend to raise English learners' self-esteem and thus facilitate their acquisition of English.

Answer

It will tend to increase cultural dissonance in the school among students from different cultural groups.

Answer

It will tend to expand English learners' understanding of educational and career opportunities.

Answer

It will tend to lessen the likelihood that English learners will acculturate successfully in U.S. mainstream culture.

Question 3

Depending on the nature of the dialogue, a person may opt to use various language nuances. Which of the subsequent circumstances best exemplifies this phenomenon?

Accepted Answer

A person uses one set of vocabulary words and language structures when discussing a topic with friends but uses another set when discussing the same topic with colleagues.

Answer

A person who grew up speaking a regional dialect moves to another part of the United States and continues to use the native dialect with which he or she is comfortable

Answer

An English learner uses double negatives when speaking or writing in English in class but constructs the negative correctly when completing language exercises.

Answer

A teacher who speaks both English and Spanish asks parents and guardians which language they would prefer to use during parent- teacher conferences.

Question 4

Which of the following exercises is most likely to help high school English learners get familiar with the conventions and standard discourse structures used in academic essays?

Accepted Answer

helping students analyze sample essays and construct graphic organizers illustrating the structure of different types of essays, which they can refer to when drafting their own essays

Answer

having a small group of students brainstorm a topic for an essay, after which each student writes a short draft of an essay that is analyzed by the rest of the group

Answer

providing students with copies of essays that have key content-related vocabulary words omitted and asking the students to try to fill in the missing words

Answer

asking students to review samples of different types of essays and to identify the vocabulary and grammatical structures the samples have in common

Question 5

Which of the following should a student focus on the most in order to become a competent writer?

Accepted Answer

audience and purpose

Answer

structure and organization

Answer

syntactic complexity

Answer

lexical specificity

Question 6

What fundamental principle of social-interactionist theories of language learning is it?

Accepted Answer

Language learners need to have meaningful opportunities to negotiate meaning with others and to construct comprehensible output in the target language.

Answer

Language learners acquire a target language over time by developing an interlanguage that increasingly resembles the target language.

Answer

Language learners need a "silent period" to develop their receptive language skills in a target language before they can produce meaningful discourse.

Answer

Language learners acquire a target language over time by developing an interlanguage that increasingly resembles the target language.

Question 7

Oral presentations are being made by seventh-grade ELD students at the intermediate level. During each lecture, the instructor encourages the students in the audience to raise their hands and ask the speaker to repeat or clarify any points they do not understand. Participating in this way enhances the communication competence of English language learners largely by:

Accepted Answer

promoting their development of social language-learning strategies.

Answer

enhancing their awareness of grammatical features of communication.

Answer

ensuring that instruction is within their zones of proximal development.

Answer

helping them apply cognitive processes for synthesizing and internalizing language.

A group of elementary school students who are learning English at the starting level have trouble pronouncing a specific phoneme.Which of the following approaches is most likely to be the best starting point for dealing with the kids' difficulty?

A group of elementary school students who are learning English at the starting level have trouble pronouncing a specific phoneme.
Which of the following approaches is most likely to be the best starting point for dealing with the kids' difficulty?