Foundations of Language and Literacy Development
This domain tests whether you can explain how reading develops and use that explanation to interpret what a student actually does when reading aloud. Items typically describe a student's behavior and ask you to name the underlying skill, stage, or instructional need.
Two models that organize everything
- Simple View of Reading: Reading comprehension = Decoding × Linguistic comprehension. The factors are separate and multiplicative, so a near-zero in either one collapses the product. A student who decodes fluently but understands little needs language work; a student who understands everything heard but misreads words needs decoding work. The visible symptom ("poor reader") is identical.
- Scarborough's Rope: lower strands (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) weave into word recognition; upper strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge) weave into comprehension. Strands are interdependent, but adding more of one does not compensate for a deficit in another.
Developmental sequence
- Ehri's phases: pre-alphabetic (reads logos, guesses from pictures), partial alphabetic (uses some letters, often first and last), full alphabetic (maps all phonemes to graphemes, can blend), consolidated alphabetic (uses rimes, syllables, morphemes as chunks).
- Orthographic mapping: readers permanently bond graphemes to phonemes, which is how sight vocabulary grows. Sight words are mapped, not shape-memorized.
Worked example
A second grader reads ship as sip, chat as cat, and wish as wis, but retells the story with accurate detail and sophisticated vocabulary. Reasoning: comprehension is intact; every error involves a digraph. This is a full-alphabetic reader with an incomplete digraph mapping. The fix is explicit sh/ch/th/wh/ck instruction with Elkonin boxes and decodable practice, not more comprehension strategy lessons.
Traps that cost marks
- Labeling every struggle as "comprehension" or "dyslexia" before locating the breakdown with the Simple View.
- Confusing phonological awareness (words, syllables, rhymes) with phonemic awareness (individual phonemes).
- Endorsing shape-based sight-word memorization, which contradicts orthographic mapping and predicts poor spelling.