TExES EC-6 English Language Arts & Reading 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A teacher wants to help students make inferences. Which question stem best prompts inferential thinking?
- 'What does the word _____ mean in paragraph 2?'
- 'What happened at the beginning of the story?'
- 'What can you conclude about the character based on her actions in the story?' (Correct answer)
- 'What is the title of this book?'
Correct answer: 'What can you conclude about the character based on her actions in the story?'
Inferential questions ask students to go beyond literal text by drawing conclusions from evidence, making them higher-order comprehension questions.
Question 2: Which is an example of a morpheme-based vocabulary strategy?
- Using a thesaurus to find synonyms for a word
- Breaking the word 'prehistoric' into 'pre-' (before) and 'historic' (related to history) to determine meaning (Correct answer)
- Reading the word multiple times until it is recognized automatically
- Looking for the word in a picture dictionary
Correct answer: Breaking the word 'prehistoric' into 'pre-' (before) and 'historic' (related to history) to determine meaning
Analyzing meaningful word parts (prefixes, roots, suffixes) is a morpheme-based strategy that helps students decode and understand unfamiliar words.
Question 3: Which best describes the difference between revising and editing in the writing process?
- Revising fixes spelling; editing improves ideas
- Revising focuses on improving content, organization, and clarity; editing addresses grammar, punctuation, and mechanics (Correct answer)
- Revising is done by peers only; editing is done by the teacher
- Revising and editing are the same stage of the writing process
Correct answer: Revising focuses on improving content, organization, and clarity; editing addresses grammar, punctuation, and mechanics
Revising addresses higher-order concerns like ideas and structure, while editing focuses on surface-level conventions like spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Question 4: A teacher reads a picture book aloud, pausing to ask questions and make predictions. This is best described as a:
- Sustained silent reading session
- Running record assessment
- Interactive read-aloud (Correct answer)
- Fluency probe
Correct answer: Interactive read-aloud
An interactive read-aloud is a structured oral reading event in which the teacher intentionally pauses to model thinking and engage students in discussion.
Question 5: Which statement best describes phonological awareness?
- The ability to match letters to their corresponding sounds
- The oral and auditory ability to hear and manipulate units of sound in spoken language (Correct answer)
- The ability to read words quickly and accurately
- Knowledge of spelling patterns and rules
Correct answer: The oral and auditory ability to hear and manipulate units of sound in spoken language
Phonological awareness is an umbrella term for the oral/auditory ability to recognize and manipulate sound units (words, syllables, onsets, rimes, phonemes) without print.
Question 6: When teaching expository writing, a teacher asks students to state their position and support it with evidence. This type of writing is called:
- Descriptive writing
- Narrative writing
- Argumentative/persuasive writing (Correct answer)
- Procedural writing
Correct answer: Argumentative/persuasive writing
Argumentative writing requires students to take a stance and support it with logical evidence and reasoning, a key genre in ELA standards.
Question 7: A 3rd-grade student reads grade-level text accurately but very slowly, which affects comprehension. The teacher should prioritize:
- Phonemic awareness activities
- Fluency-building strategies such as repeated reading and reader's theater (Correct answer)
- Decoding instruction for multisyllabic words
- Morphology lessons on prefixes and suffixes
Correct answer: Fluency-building strategies such as repeated reading and reader's theater
When accuracy is strong but rate is slow and comprehension suffers, fluency-building strategies like repeated reading and reader's theater directly target reading rate and prosody.
TExES EC-6 English Language Arts & Reading 5
A teacher wants to help students make inferences.
Which question stem best prompts inferential thinking?