New Hampshire Foundations of Reading Practice Test

Which strategy can help beginning readers use context clues effectively?

1. Reading only familiar texts without variations

2. Ignoring pictures and visuals altogether

3. Encouraging them to skip unknown words and guess meanings

4. Restricting the context of words to single sentences

The correct answer is: Encouraging them to skip unknown words and guess meanings

Using context clues effectively is a crucial strategy for beginning readers as it helps them infer the meaning of unknown words based on surrounding text. Encouraging students to skip over unknown words and use the broader context of the sentence or paragraph allows them to make educated guesses about the meanings of those words. This practice promotes critical reading skills, as readers learn to pay attention to the relationships between words and the overall message in the text. In this context, the best approach is to empower students to rely on their intuition and previous knowledge to make sense of what they are reading, which helps build their vocabulary and comprehension skills. By considering the context that encompasses unknown words, beginning readers can learn to decode meanings from clues such as sentence structure, tone, and other words nearby, enhancing their overall reading experience and skills.