LANTITE Literacy: Reading Comprehension and Language Conventions
LANTITE Literacy tests the reading and language skills a teacher needs to interpret curriculum documents, student work and parent communication, and to model standard Australian English. ACER administers 65 multiple-choice questions in 120 minutes; the pass standard sits at roughly the top 30 per cent of Year 9 students, so reading load and distractors - not content - defeat most candidates. Items reflect the Australian Curriculum: English and the Graduate Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.
The two question families
- Reading: unseen informative, persuasive, literary and everyday/workplace texts, with items on main idea, locating detail, vocabulary in context, inference, author purpose and tone, and how structure or visuals shape meaning.
- Language conventions: spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax, cohesive devices and register, usually framed as editing a draft or choosing the best revision of a sentence.
Rules worth automating
- Apostrophes mark possession or contraction, never plurals: the teachers' room; it's (it is) versus its (possessive).
- With neither…nor / either…or, the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
- Never join two independent clauses with a comma alone; use a semicolon, a full stop or a comma plus coordinating conjunction.
- Pronouns must have one unambiguous referent; cohesive markers must signal the actual relationship (contrast, cause, sequence).
- Match register to purpose: formal reports avoid contractions, slang and vague evaluative language.
Worked example
Sentence: "Neither the principal nor the teachers was aware of the timetable change." Reasoning: the subject is compound and joined by nor, so the verb agrees with the nearer element, teachers - plural - giving were. The interrupting phrase of the timetable change is irrelevant to agreement. Had the order been reversed (Neither the teachers nor the principal was…), the singular would be correct.
Traps
Options that are true in the world but unsupported by the text; treating an inference as a stated fact; rejecting a correct option because it is phrased more formally than the passage; overlooking EXCEPT or best in the stem; correcting one error while creating another.