CALT Exam 2026/2027 Questions & Answers | 150+ Questions | Dyslexia, Structured Literacy, Phonology, Assessment & Orton-Gillingham

This comprehensive CALT Exam 2026/2027 preparation document contains 150+ exam questions and answers covering the major concepts associated with Certified Academic Language Therapist preparation, structured literacy, dyslexia intervention, and evidence-based reading instruction. Core topics include the National Reading Panel's “Big Five”—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—alongside the alphabetic principle, sound-symbol correspondence, decoding, instant word recognition, listening comprehension, written expressive language, mechanics, composition, and direct instruction. The document emphasizes comprehension as the ultimate goal of reading and fluency as an important bridge between decoding and comprehension. A substantial section examines the structure of language through phonology, morphology, syntax, orthography, semantics, and pragmatics. Students review phonological versus phonemic awareness, morphemes, orthographic memory, figurative language, syllable and sound structures, phonetics, graphemes, consonant classification, articulation, continuous and clipped consonants, nasal sounds, voiced and voiceless cognates, vowels, allophones, and the approximately 44 speech sounds addressed in the material. The document also explores the three components of phonological processing—phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming—and identifies phoneme segmentation as an important predictor of early reading performance. Dyslexia is treated extensively, including its neurological and phonological foundations, word recognition, spelling and decoding difficulties, and associated conditions such as dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and dyspraxia. The study material reviews reading-related brain regions including Broca's area, the parieto-temporal region, and the occipito-temporal word-form area, as well as patterns described for dyslexic readers. Historical material covers Adolf Kussmaul, Rudolf Berlin, James Hinshelwood, W. Pringle Morgan, Samuel T. Orton, Anna Gillingham, Bessie Stillman, Sally Childs, Beth Slingerland, Aylett Cox, Isabelle Liberman, Keith Stanovich, Maryanne Wolf, Sally Shaywitz, and other influential contributors to dyslexia and reading research. The document also provides detailed coverage of Multisensory Structured Language and Orton-Gillingham-based instruction. It reviews IMSLEC competencies involving phonology, alphabetic sound-symbol associations, syllable instruction, morphology, syntax, semantics, and comprehension, together with simultaneous multisensory VAKT techniques, systematic and cumulative instruction, direct instruction, diagnostic teaching, and synthetic and analytic approaches. Synthetic instruction is presented as building from parts to a whole, while analytic instruction involves breaking a whole into its component parts. Assessment and professional practice form another important section. Topics include formative and summative assessment, screening, progress monitoring, achievement and cognitive tests, validity, reliability, raw and derived scores, standard scores, percentiles, grade equivalents, normal curve equivalents, and standard deviation. Named instruments include the Woodcock-Johnson, WIAT, KTEA, CTOPP, GORT, TERA, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and other measures. The document also reviews ALTA and IMSLEC ethical expectations and federal protections relevant to learners with dyslexia, including IDEA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Additional high-value topics include Jeanne Chall's stages of reading development, metacognition and comprehension strategies, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and Middle English influences on English vocabulary, inflectional and derivational morphology, prosody, experimental and quasi-experimental research, and major developments in the history of reading science. This makes the material particularly relevant for CALT candidates, Academic Language Therapists, dyslexia therapists, reading specialists, structured literacy practitioners, literacy interventionists, special education teachers, educational diagnosticians, and students in literacy education, reading science, special education, language development, and dyslexia intervention. The document does not identify a specific university or formal course code, so these details are marked as unspecified rather than invented. 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