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MTEL Foundations Of Reading Test Breakdown

Foundations of Reading Development has four subareas with a total of 43 to 45 questions and counts 35 percent of the final score.

1. Phonological and Phonemic awareness: distinction between phonological and phonemic and role of awareness in reading development, skills and levels; and explicit and implicit strategies to promote awareness and their role in the reading growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers.
2. Concepts of Print and the Alphabetic Principle: meanings in print, environmental impact of print media, relationship between speaking and writing, handling books, strategies for linking text and determining where the message is going, knowledge of letters and letter pairs and their formation, and use of reading and writing to teach letter sounds and assessments to determine the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers.
3. Phonics: role in quickly recognizing words, how decoding helps improve reading skills, strategies for decoding single and multi-syllable words, use of phonetic generalizations, semantics, syntactic clues and oral vocabulary to decode word meanings, phonetic terms, and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers.
4. Word Analysis Skills and Strategies: word structure, relationship between analytical abilities and reading comprehension, identify morphemes, prefixes and suffixes, Latin and Greek words and know their definitions, using and analyzing syllables and morphemes to identify words and spelling patterns, methods to identify compound words and homographs, using context clues to determine words meanings and pronunciation, and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers in developing word analysis skills.

Development of Reading Comprehension has three subareas with a total of 33 to 35 questions and counts 27 percent of the final score.

1. Vocabulary Development: relationship between oral and written vocabulary and reading comprehension, using systematic, contextual and non-contextual strategies, using speaking vocabulary to identify and understand written words, methods for improving speaking and reading comprehension and recognizing foreign words and abbreviations, determining and using the appropriate word, learning to use context and semantic cues and a dictionary and thesaurus to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word or phrase, and use of content-specific vocabulary to improve understanding of new words in other classes and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers in learning and retaining new vocabulary words.
2. Applying Reading Comprehension Skills to Understanding Imaginative and Literary Texts: reading as a process to understand meaning, literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension and their various stages, connecting new information to background knowledge from other sources and identifying facts to substantiate the relationship, developing and using analytical skills, metacognitive strategies and verbal activities to improve comprehension and reading fluency, writing activities that improve analytical skills, and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers in applying reading comprehension skills in understanding imaginative and literary works.
3. Applying Reading Comprehension Skills to Understanding to Informational and Expository Texts: reading as a process to understand meaning, literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension and their various stages, methods for identifying point of view, fact from opinion and faulty reasoning, strategies for reading various types of material, purposes for reading, comprehension strategies, verbal and written language activities, text and graphic structures and their features, uses of and reasons for various reference sources, ability to use comprehension skills and strategies, and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers in applying reading comprehension skills in understanding informational and expository works.

Reading Assessment and Instruction has two subareas with a total of 21 to 23 questions and counts 18 percent of the final score.

1. Formal and Informal Methods for Assessing Reading Development: characteristics and applications of criterion and norm referenced test data to adjust instructional methods, assess growth and identify potential problems, validity, reliability and bias in various testing methods, characteristics, uses and effectiveness of individual and group reading-related activities and assignments, strategies for determining specific reading and comprehension skills, use of contextual supports, and level of student frustration and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers in overall reading development.
2. Multiple Approaches to Reading Instruction: theories, approaches, practices, programs and instructional technologies, planning, organizing, managing and adjusting different strategies to help students at all levels of fluency, strategies to improve specific reading skills, uses of individual, small and large group reading activities and assignments, methods for selecting reading material that is interesting and meaningful to students at all levels of fluency and encourages reading for pleasure, and methods of assessing the growth of English language learners, struggling students and fluent readers.

MTEL Foundations Of Reading Test Practice Questions