CALT Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield CALT facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. The ultimate goal of teaching decoding and spelling skills to automaticity in an MSL program is to: → free up cognitive resources for reading comprehension.
2. Which of the following best describes 'connected text reading' as used in CALT lessons? → Reading sentences and passages that contain only phoneme-grapheme patterns already taught
3. Which historical figures developed the original multisensory approach to reading instruction for students with dyslexia? → Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham
4. When conducting a reading fluency assessment, which measure provides the most direct indicator of automaticity? → Words correct per minute (WCPM)
5. Morphosyntax refers to the intersection of: → Morphology meaning word structure and syntax meaning sentence structure
6. A CALT is working with a student on reading multisyllabic words by breaking them into syllables. This strategy is called: → Syllabication or syllable division
7. Educational therapy differs from tutoring primarily because it: → Addresses underlying cognitive and processing deficits that interfere with learning
8. Understanding complex inverted conditional sentences such as Had she studied she would have passed the test requires: → Advanced syntactic knowledge of inverted conditional constructions
9. The word autobiography can be fully analyzed as: → auto meaning self, bio meaning life, graph meaning write, and -y as a noun suffix
10. Which pair of words best illustrates the difference between a closed syllable and an open syllable? → go / got
11. When a student is discharged from ALTA-based therapy, what is the ethical responsibility regarding records? → Retain records according to applicable legal and professional standards
12. The inference reading strategy requires readers to: → Use background knowledge and text clues to understand information not directly stated
13. Which is a key feature of evidence-based educational therapy for dyslexia? → Explicit, cumulative, and systematic instruction
14. When teaching morpheme families, a CALT practitioner groups 'dictate,' 'predict,' and 'verdict' together. What Latin root do they share? → dict (to say/speak)
15. Which principle underlies the use of simultaneous multisensory instruction in academic language therapy? → Engaging visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways strengthens memory traces
16. Which of the following BEST describes the role of 'audience awareness' in written composition? → Selecting appropriate vocabulary for a given reader's knowledge level
17. An academic language therapist uses informal assessments, such as observing a student read a list of nonsense words, primarily to: → Guide daily instructional decisions and monitor progress on specific skills.
18. A student spells 'knit' as 'nit.' Which orthographic concept should be taught to address this error? → Silent letter patterns
19. The task asking a student to say sunlight and then say it without sun assesses: → Syllable deletion
20. A CALT teaches a student to identify the 'somebody-wanted-but-so-then' structure. Which type of text does this strategy target? → Narrative text
21. Which MSL principle is MOST directly violated if a therapist skips vowel team instruction because a student finds it boring? → Systematic and sequential progression through structured language content
22. Which type of knowledge does a student apply when recognizing that 'unhappy,' 'unkind,' and 'untrue' all share the same prefix meaning? → Morphological awareness
23. Which term describes the ability to read words accurately and quickly without conscious attention, freeing cognitive resources for comprehension? → Automaticity
24. In the word 'unbelievably', which of the following is the base word or free morpheme? → believe
25. Which of the following is a hallmark feature of expository writing that distinguishes it from narrative writing? → Use of text structures such as problem-solution or description
26. Which federal law is the basis for 504 Plans and prohibits discrimination against students with disabilities in schools that receive federal funding? → Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
27. Sentence combining is an instructional technique used to: → Develop syntactic maturity by joining simple sentences into more complex ones
28. In a structured lesson, what is the purpose of the auditory drill component? → To build rapid, automatic recall of graphemes when phonemes are presented aloud
29. Which principle is foundational to Academic Language Therapy for students with dyslexia? → Multisensory structured language instruction
30. Which phonological awareness skill is typically the LAST to develop in the normal sequence? → Phoneme manipulation (e.g., deletion, reversal)