Test Objective 05 – UIC College of Education Content Test Prep

Question #1

An early childhood teacher works in the infant room of a child care center. She sits on the floor to play with a nine-month-old who is interested in a bucket of plastic blocks that can be stacked together. Which of the following teacher actions would best engage the infant and encourage communication?

A. Imitating the sounds the infant makes B. Telling the infant about the different colors of the blocks C. Talking about the blocks as the infant plays with them D. Asking the infant questions about with nonverbal cues

You answered

Correct Response: C

At this age, infants may be able to speak a few words and most infants practice speaking by babbling nonsense words. Teachers and families play a critical role in developing language rich learning environments. Adding words or questions to what an infant is doing such as “you have the pink block” encourages communication and models language for the infant.

Question #2

With regard to typical oral language development, which of the following sentences would likely emerge last?

A. "I can do it."B. "More juice."C. "She’s laughing."D. "Put in box."

You answered

Correct Response: C

Young children’s oral language development follows a predictable sequence from less to more complex. The use of the grammatical morpheme ‘s to form a contraction of the words She and is represents a more sophisticated stage of oral language development than the constructed sentences in the other responses, which typically occur earlier.

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Are you looking for a resource to help you familiarize yourself with terms such as morpheme, syntax, phoneme, homograph, prosody, onset-rime, etc.? Check out the Literacy Terms At a Glance resource linked here or find it in the pull down menu for Module 4 resources.

Question #3

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

A. Read aloud in English from a book and have the student to guess the meaning of unfamiliar wordsB. Identify and reinforce the phonemes that are used in spoken English but not in the child’s primary languageC. Help identify words that sounds the same English and the child’s primary languageD. Give immediate feedback after the child makes pronunciation errors in spoken English

You answered

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.