WIAT Oral Language & Listening Comprehension 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A student hears: 'Although it was raining heavily, Maria decided to walk to the store.' What is the relationship between the two clauses?
- Cause and effect
- Contrast or concession (Correct answer)
- Time sequence
- Condition
Correct answer: Contrast or concession
The word 'although' signals a concessive relationship, meaning the second action happened despite the first.
Question 2: Which WIAT-4 task requires a student to listen to a sentence and then repeat it verbatim?
- Oral Word Fluency
- Sentence Repetition (Correct answer)
- Expressive Vocabulary
- Oral Discourse Comprehension
Correct answer: Sentence Repetition
Sentence Repetition directly measures a student's ability to hold and reproduce spoken sentences accurately.
Question 3: A child consistently omits the subject of sentences when speaking, saying 'Went to the park' instead of 'I went to the park.' This most likely reflects a deficit in:
- Phonological awareness
- Morphosyntactic production (Correct answer)
- Receptive vocabulary
- Listening comprehension
Correct answer: Morphosyntactic production
Omitting obligatory sentence subjects is a morphosyntactic production error affecting grammatical sentence structure.
Question 4: On the WIAT Listening Comprehension subtest, a student hears a passage and must answer questions about it. Which cognitive skill is LEAST directly measured by this task?
- Auditory memory
- Inferential reasoning
- Oral reading fluency (Correct answer)
- Vocabulary knowledge
Correct answer: Oral reading fluency
Oral reading fluency requires decoding printed text, which is not involved in a purely auditory listening comprehension task.
Question 5: When evaluating a student's oral expression, an examiner notes frequent use of vague language like 'stuff' and 'things' instead of specific nouns. This pattern most directly suggests a weakness in:
- Syntax
- Pragmatics
- Word retrieval (Correct answer)
- Phonemic awareness
Correct answer: Word retrieval
Using vague placeholders instead of specific words is a hallmark of word-finding or word-retrieval difficulties.
Question 6: A student listens to the following riddle: 'I have hands but no fingers. I have a face but no eyes. What am I?' Understanding this riddle requires:
- Literal comprehension only
- Interpreting figurative and non-literal language (Correct answer)
- Phonological decoding
- Morphological analysis
Correct answer: Interpreting figurative and non-literal language
Riddles depend on recognizing that words like 'hands' and 'face' are used in non-literal, figurative senses.
Question 7: Which of the following best describes the purpose of the Oral Word Fluency task on the WIAT?
- Measuring how quickly a student can read a word list aloud
- Assessing how many words a student can generate in a category within a time limit (Correct answer)
- Testing whether a student can define vocabulary words
- Evaluating a student's ability to repeat orally presented sentences
Correct answer: Assessing how many words a student can generate in a category within a time limit
Oral Word Fluency measures lexical retrieval speed and breadth by having students name as many items in a given category as possible.
WIAT Oral Language & Listening Comprehension 2
A student hears: 'Although it was raining heavily, Maria decided to walk to the store.' What is the relationship between the two clauses?