Praxis Elementary 5001

The Reading and Language Arts subtest contains 80 selected-response questions in 90 minutes. About 47% of the questions assess Reading: foundational skills (phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency) and comprehension of literature and informational texts. About 53% assess Writing, Speaking, and Listening: writing types and processes, conventions of standard English, vocabulary, and oral language. Many questions describe a student's reading or writing and ask what skill it shows or what the teacher should do next.

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language: words in sentences, syllables in words, onsets and rimes, and individual sounds. Phonemic awareness is the most advanced part of phonological awareness: awareness of the individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound that distinguish one word from another. English has approximately 44 phonemes (the exact count varies by dialect), represented by 26 letters. Phonological awareness is an oral skill; it involves no print, which is what separates it from phonics.

Children typically develop awareness of larger units before smaller ones, and this progression guides the order of instruction.

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Counting words in a

Clapping pen-cil

/c/ + /at/ = cat

/c/ /a/ /t/; blending,

spoken sentence

cat, hat, bat

segmenting, manipulating

The onset is the consonant or consonant cluster before the vowel in a syllable (the st in stop); the rime is the vowel and everything after it (op). Rimes support word families and decoding by analogy: a child who can read cake can use the - ake rime to read snake and brake.

Phonemicawarenesstasks(Fromeasiertoharder)

Task	WhattheChildDoes	ExamplePromptandResponse
Isolation	Identifiesasoundinagivenposition	"What is the first sound in dog?" /d/ →
Identity	Recognizesthesoundsharedbyseveralwords	"What sound is the same in bike , boy , bell?" →
		/b/
Categorization Blending Segmentation	Identifiesthewordwiththeoddsound Combinesspokensoundsintoaword Breaksawordintoitssounds	"Whichworddoesn'tbelong:bus bun , , rug "/s/ /u/ /n/ — what word?" → sun "How many sounds in ship?" → /sh/ /i/	rug 1?" → /p/ three ,

Phonemicawarenesstasks(Fromeasiertoharder)(Continued)

Task	WhattheChildDoes	ExamplePromptandResponse
Deletion	Removesasoundtomakeanewword	"Say smile without /s/ ." mile →
Addition	Addsasoundtomakeanewword	"Add /s/ to the beginning of park ." spark →
Substitution	Replacesonesoundwithanother	"Change /p/ in pin to /t/ ." tin →

Count phonemes, not letters. Ship has four letters but three phonemes; box has three letters but four phonemes (/b/ /o/ /k/ /s/). Blending and segmenting are the phonemic awareness skills most strongly linked to learning to read and spell. Instruction that combines phonemic awareness with letters (for example, Elkonin sound boxes with letter tiles) is especially effective once children know some letter-sound correspondences.

Print Concepts and Alphabet Knowledge

Concepts of print are understandings about how written language works. Children who have them know how to hold a book, where the front cover and title are, that print (not the pictures) carries the message, and that English is read left to right and top to bottom with a return sweep to the next line. They understand the difference between a letter, a word, and a sentence, that words are separated by spaces, and that punctuation marks carry meaning. Concept of word, the ability to match spoken words to printed words while reading (voice-print match), is a key milestone that links print concepts to phonemic awareness.

Alphabet knowledge includes recognizing and naming upper- and lowercase letters, knowing letter-sound correspondences, and forming letters. Letter-name knowledge at kindergarten entry is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Environmental print (logos, signs, and labels) shows that print is meaningful, but recognizing a familiar logo relies on its visual context and does not by itself show that a child can read the word.

Shared reading with an enlarged text is the classic setting for teaching print concepts: the teacher points to each word while reading, models the return sweep, and asks children to find the title, a capital letter, or a space between two words.