Correct Response: A. Explicitly teaching the student common English syllable-division strategies, or patterns (e.g., VC/CV, V/CV, VC/V, V/V, /stable final syllable), will provide the student with an evidence-based strategy for dividing multisyllable words into decodable parts. By applying syllable-division strategies, the student would be more likely to accurately pronounce each syllable in an unfamiliar word, which would facilitate the student's ability to recognize it as a word in their oral vocabulary. Using an intervention strategy that has been proven to be effective in supporting readers' accurate decoding of multisyllable words will allow the teacher to determine if the student has the potential for improvement with a short-term intervention. If the retest results show no improvement, this would indicate to the teacher that the student likely lacks the foundational phonics skills necessary to benefit from instruction in syllabication. Option B is incorrect because teaching a particular strategy does not provide a teacher with national benchmarks. Option C is incorrect because the intervention described focuses on improving the student's word-level foundational reading skills development, not on text-level reading comprehension development. Option D is incorrect because most students require explicit instruction in syllabication strategies (and morphemic analysis) to support them in learning how to read unfamiliar multisyllable words accurately and automatically. Just because this student has not yet mastered reading multisyllable words does not suggest that the student has a specific reading disability
