ILTS 206 Sub-Area 2 Practice Question #04

Which oral language activity would best promote phonological processing skills for a child who is an English Language Learner?

Read aloud in English from a book and have the student to guess the meaning of unfamiliar wordsIdentify and reinforce the phonemes that are used in spoken English but not in the child’s primary languageHelp identify words that sounds the same English and the child’s primary languageGive immediate feedback after the child makes pronunciation errors in spoken English

Correct Response: B

According to the researchers, children’s minds are trained to categorize phonemes in their first language, which may conflict with phonemes used in English. For example, Spanish-speaking children may speak, read, and write ch when sh should be used because in Spanish, these two combinations produce the same phoneme (International Reading Association, 2001).

It is important for teachers to understand the linguistic characteristics of a student’s home language, including the phonemes that exist and do not exist in that language so that they can better support the child’s phonemic awareness development in English.