FTCE Professional Education Practice Test Questions With Complete Solutions

1. Phonemic Awareness - ANSWER The ability to distinguish, manipulate, and blend specific sounds or phonemes within an individual word. It is oral. It is a specific type of phonological awareness dealing only with phonemes in a spoken word (Phonological Awareness is an umbrella and this is a spoke of that umbrella). The findings of the National Reading Panel (2000) were most instrumental in increasing emphasis on instruction in this area. 2. Phonics - ANSWER The study of relationships between phonemes (speech sounds) and graphemes (letters) that represent the phonemes. It is also decoding or the sounding out of unknown written words. 3. Phonics Approach - ANSWER The teacher asks the child to look at the beginning letter of a word, then asks the child to connect the beginning letter to the text and story and to think about what word would make sense there 4. Phonological Awareness - ANSWER The ability to recognize that spoken words are composed of a set of smaller units such as onsets, rimes, syllables and sounds and how they can be blended together, segmented, and switched/manipulated to form new combinations and words. It is auditory and must be in place before the alphabetic principle can be taught. 5. Phonological Awareness vs. Phonemic Awareness - ANSWER Phonological Awareness - awareness that words are made up of small sound units (phonemes) and can be segmented into larger sound "chunks" known as syllables and each syllable begin with a sound (onset) and ends with another sound (rime). 6. Phonemic Awareness - involves an understanding of the ways that sounds function in words, but deals with only one aspect of sound: the phoneme. It is the ability to recognize the most minute sound units in words. 7. Phonological Cues - ANSWER Readers use their knowledge of letter/sound and sound/letter relationships to predict and confirm meaning. 8. Phonology - ANSWER The study of speech structure in language that includes both the patterns of basic speech units (phonemes) and the tacit rules of pronunciation. 9. Portfolios - ANSWER Collections of a child's work over time. They include a cover letter, reflections from the child and teacher, and other supportive documents including standards, performance-task examples, prompts, and sometimes peer comments. 10. Pre-Alphabetic Stage - ANSWER Students read words by memorizing their visual features or guessing words from their context. 11. Pressley, Michael - ANSWER Comprehension Strategy Instruction. A complex instructional process for teaching students to use multiple comprehension strategies flexibly and interactively. 12. Primary Language (an ELL term) - ANSWER The language an individual is the most fluent in and at ease with. This is usually, but not always, the individual's first language. 13. Promote Word Study - ANSWER Children should be required to go to the dictionary at least once or twice a day, collect and share words of interest they find in their readings, and do vocabulary work sheets from a basal reader or commercial vocabulary book. 14. Prompts - ANSWER When the teacher intervenes in the child's independent reading to help with pronouncing or comprehending a specific word. On a reading record, the teacher notes this assistance. When the teacher wants to match a child with a particular book or determine the child's stage/level of reading, the teacher does not use ______. 15. Prosody - ANSWER Reading expression, appropriate phrasing, and good inflection are characteristics of 16. Question-Generating Strategy for an Expository Text - ANSWER First the child previews the text by reading titles, subheadings, looking at pictures or illustrations, and reading the first paragraph. Next the child asks a "think" question, which he or she records. Then the child reads to find information that might answer the "think" question. The child may write down the information found or think about another question that is answered by what is being read. The child continues to read, using this strategy. 17. Reading for Information - ANSWER Reading with the purpose of extracting facts and expert opinion from the text. Children should be introduced to the following information reading resources: web resources that are age and grade appropriate for children, the concept of the table of contents, chapter headings, glossaries, pictures, maps, charts, diagrams and text structures in an information text. They should be taught to use notes, graphs, organizers, and mind maps to share information extracted from a text. 18. Reciprocal Teaching - ANSWER Developed by Palinscar and Brown. Metacognitive strategy package of Predicting, Clarifying, Questioning, and Summarizing. Visualizing is sometimes taught as a fifth strategy. 19. Recode - ANSWER To change information from one code into another, as recoding writing into oral speech. 20. Recognition Vocabulary - ANSWER The group of words that children are able to correctly pronounce, read orally, and understand on sight. 21. Record of Reading Behavior (Running Record) - ANSWER An objective observation during which the teacher records, using a standard set of symbols, everything the child reader says as the child reads a book selected by the teacher. 22. Records of Independent Reading and Writing - ANSWER These can include the children's journals, notebooks or logs of books read with the names of the authors, titles of the books, date completed, and pieces related to books completed or in progress. 23. Reflection - ANSWER To analyze, discuss, and react to one's learning on any grade or age level. 24. Reliability - ANSWER The degree to which an assessment measures what it is supposed to measure over time. 25. Retelling - ANSWER Can be written or oral. Children are expected and encouraged to tell as much of a story as they can remember. It is far more extensive than just summarizing. Children should include the beginning, middle, and end plot lines and should be able to tell about the book's characters. 26. Rosenblatt, Louise - ANSWER Described the act of reading as a dynamic "transaction" between the reader and the text. She argued that the meaning of any text lay not in the work itself but in the reader's interaction with it. Her work made her a well-known reader-response theorist (Transactional Theory or Approach). 27. Routman, Regie - ANSWER Researcher and author who shows teachers how to teach consistent with findings in reading research yet also with highly practical "scripted lessons" and teaching tips that make the classroom come alive. She advocates for literature based teaching and meaning centered approaches for learning. (Elementary Level) 28. Rubric - ANSWER A set of guidelines or acceptable responses for the completion of any task. Usually ranges from 0 to 4 with 4 being the most detailed response and 0 indicating a response to the task that lacked detail or was in other ways insufficient. 29. Scaffolding - ANSWER Refers to the teacher support necessary for the child to accomplish a task or to achieve a goal that the child could not accomplish on his/her own. Vygotsky termed this window of opportunity the "zone of proximal development." Ultimately, as the child becomes more proficient or capable, the scaffold it is withdrawn. The goal is to help the child perform the reading task independently and internalize the behavior. 30. Searching - ANSWER Children pause to search in the picture, print, or their memory for known information. This can happen as the child tackles an unknown word or after an error. 31. Second Language (ELL term) - ANSWER A language acquired or learned simultaneously with or after a child's acquisition of a first language. 32. Segmenting - ANSWER The process of hearing a spoken word and identifying its separate phonemes or syllables. 33. Self-Correction - ANSWER Children begin to correct some of their own reading errors. Generally, this behavior is accompanied by the rereading of the previous phrase or sentence. 34. Semantic Cues - ANSWER Children use their prior knowledge, sense of the story, and pictures to support their predicting and confirming the meaning of the text. 35. Semantic Web - ANSWER A visual graphic organizer that the teacher can use to introduce a reading on a specific topic. It visually represents many other words associated with a target word. The web can help activate the children's prior knowledge and extend or clarify it. It can also serve to check new learning after guided or independent reading. 36. Spatial Learning - ANSWER Using images, color, or layout to help readers of this learning style. 37. Stahl, Stephen A - ANSWER Nationally known researcher in the areas of beginning reading, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary instruction. 38. Standard Score - ANSWER How far a child's grade on a standardized test is from the average score (mean) on the test in terms of the standard deviation. If a child scores 70 on a standardized test and the standard deviation is 5 and the average (mean) score is 65, the child is one standard deviation above the average. 39. Standardized Test - ANSWER A test given under specified conditions allowing comparisons to be made. A set of norms or average scores on this test will be used for comparisons. 40. Stop-and-Think Strategy - ANSWER A balanced literacy strategy for constructing meaning. As the text is being read, the child asks himself or herself, does this make sense to me? If it does not make sense to me, I should then try to reread it or read ahead. I can also look up words that I don't know or ask for help. 41. Strategic Readers - ANSWER As defined by researchers Marie Clay and Sharon Taberski, _________ readers are self-improving and do the following as they read: • Monitor their reading to see if it makes sense semantically, syntactically, and visually. • Look for and use semantic, syntactic, and visual clues. • Uncover and identify new things about the text. • Cross check and use one cueing system against another. • Self-correct their reading when what they first read does not match the semantic, syntactic, and visual clues • Solve for and identify new words using multiple cueing systems. 42. Structural Analysis - ANSWER The process of examining the words in the text for meaningful word units (affixes, base words, inflected endings). Syntactic Cues - ANSWER When you ask a child, if what he or she has just read "sounds right" to him or her, you are trying to get that child to use. These cues use the order of words and the student's knowledge of the oral English language to help determine if what was read could be accurate.