RICA RICA Reading Comprehension 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: According to the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is the product of which two components?
- Decoding and language comprehension (Correct answer)
- Phonemic awareness and phonics
- Fluency and vocabulary
- Background knowledge and motivation
Correct answer: Decoding and language comprehension
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) states that Reading Comprehension = Decoding × Language Comprehension, meaning both are necessary for proficient reading.
Question 2: A student reads a passage accurately and fluently but cannot answer questions about what she read. What is the most likely area of instructional need?
- Language comprehension, including vocabulary, background knowledge, and inferencing skills (Correct answer)
- Phonics and decoding, since she cannot process the words
- Fluency, since she is reading too quickly to comprehend
- Phonological awareness, which underlies all reading skills
Correct answer: Language comprehension, including vocabulary, background knowledge, and inferencing skills
When a student can decode fluently but not comprehend, the deficit lies in language comprehension — the second component of the Simple View of Reading.
Question 3: Which comprehension strategy involves students actively predicting what will come next, reading to confirm or disconfirm predictions, and revising their thinking?
- Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) (Correct answer)
- Reciprocal Teaching
- Question-Answer Relationship (QAR)
- Text mapping
Correct answer: Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA)
The DR-TA is a structured strategy where students make predictions before and during reading, then use text evidence to confirm or revise those predictions.
Question 4: What is the purpose of teaching students to identify text structures such as cause-and-effect, compare-contrast, and problem-solution?
- Understanding text structure helps students anticipate how information is organized, improving their ability to locate, remember, and summarize content (Correct answer)
- Text structure knowledge is only needed for writing assignments, not reading comprehension
- Text structures are tested directly on most standardized assessments as isolated skills
- Identifying text structure is a decoding skill that supports word recognition
Correct answer: Understanding text structure helps students anticipate how information is organized, improving their ability to locate, remember, and summarize content
Recognizing the organizational structure of a text provides readers with a framework for processing and retaining information, which directly improves comprehension.
Question 5: Which instructional approach is Reciprocal Teaching, and what four strategies does it employ?
- A collaborative discussion format in which students take turns leading group application of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing (Correct answer)
- A teacher-led lecture strategy focusing on phonics rules
- An independent reading program where students self-select texts
- A test preparation strategy that focuses solely on main idea identification
Correct answer: A collaborative discussion format in which students take turns leading group application of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing
Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) uses predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing in a structured dialogue that gradually releases comprehension strategy use to students.
Question 6: A student can answer literal 'right there' questions but struggles with inferential questions. What instructional support is most appropriate?
- Explicitly teach inferencing by modeling how to combine text clues with background knowledge to answer questions 'the author and me' and 'on my own' (Correct answer)
- Provide only literal-level questions until the student's reading level increases
- Have the student re-read the passage more slowly to find the answers
- Focus solely on improving the student's decoding speed
Correct answer: Explicitly teach inferencing by modeling how to combine text clues with background knowledge to answer questions 'the author and me' and 'on my own'
Inferential comprehension requires explicit instruction in combining text evidence with prior knowledge, which is best taught through think-aloud modeling and the QAR framework.
RICA RICA Reading Comprehension 1
According to the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is the product of which two components?