CALT Principles of Multisensory Structured Language (MSL) Education 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: The term multisensory in MSL education refers to the simultaneous engagement of:
- Multiple academic subjects
- Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways during instruction (Correct answer)
- Multiple teachers at one time
- Reading and mathematics together
Correct answer: Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways during instruction
MSL instruction engages the auditory, visual, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways simultaneously to strengthen learning through multiple sensory channels.
Multisensory instruction in the MSL framework means that reading and spelling instruction simultaneously engages three sensory pathways: auditory involving hearing sounds and sound-symbol connections; visual involving seeing letters and words; and kinesthetic-tactile involving writing, finger tracing, tapping phonemes, and manipulating letter tiles. The simultaneous engagement of all three channels creates stronger neural representations of language units.
Question 2: The MSL principle of cumulative instruction means:
- Instruction covers more content each week
- Each new concept builds directly on previously mastered material, with ongoing review (Correct answer)
- The instructor uses a cumulative grade at the end of each term
- Students read cumulatively longer texts
Correct answer: Each new concept builds directly on previously mastered material, with ongoing review
Cumulative instruction ensures that each new skill is explicitly connected to and builds upon previously mastered content, with continuous review to maintain mastery.
In MSL education, cumulative means that the instructional sequence is designed so that each new concept builds directly on previously learned material, and previously mastered content is continuously reviewed and integrated with new learning. This approach is essential for students with dyslexia who need extensive repetition and overlearning to achieve automaticity.
Question 3: Which of the following activities is an example of MSL instruction in phonics?
- Silently reading a passage and answering comprehension questions
- Simultaneous Oral Spelling where the student says each letter while writing it, then reads the word (Correct answer)
- Listening to a recording of a phonics lesson
- Looking up words in a dictionary
Correct answer: Simultaneous Oral Spelling where the student says each letter while writing it, then reads the word
Simultaneous Oral Spelling simultaneously engages auditory, kinesthetic-tactile, and visual channels, making it a classic multisensory activity for spelling instruction.
Simultaneous Oral Spelling is a quintessential MSL technique. The student simultaneously says each letter aloud engaging the auditory channel, writes it engaging the kinesthetic-tactile channel, and reads the completed word engaging the visual channel. All three modalities are active at the same time, creating strong multimodal memory traces.
Question 4: The concept of diagnostic teaching in MSL means that the CALT:
- Administers a standardized diagnostic test at the start of every lesson
- Continuously monitors and adjusts instruction based on student responses during the lesson (Correct answer)
- Only teaches students who have been formally diagnosed
- Diagnoses the student's learning style and matches instruction to it
Correct answer: Continuously monitors and adjusts instruction based on student responses during the lesson
Diagnostic teaching involves ongoing observation of student responses to adjust pacing, review, and instruction in real time, using the lesson itself as a continuous assessment tool.
Diagnostic teaching in MSL means the CALT is simultaneously teaching and assessing, constantly observing the student's accuracy, fluency, and error patterns to make real-time instructional adjustments. This may involve providing additional review, slowing the pace, or changing the mode of practice.
Question 5: The synthetic phonics approach as used in MSL instruction teaches students to:
- Memorize whole words by visual pattern
- Analyze whole texts for meaning before decoding individual words
- Blend individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode unfamiliar words (Correct answer)
- Guess words using picture and context clues
Correct answer: Blend individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode unfamiliar words
Synthetic phonics teaches students to connect individual phonemes to their graphemes and blend these connections to decode unfamiliar words from left to right.
Synthetic phonics is the approach used in MSL instruction to teach decoding: students learn the individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences and then blend these connections to read unfamiliar words. This explicit part-to-whole approach contrasts with analytic phonics and is the approach supported by the science of reading for students with dyslexia.
Question 6: The IDA's definition of structured literacy specifies that it must be all of the following except:
- Explicit
- Systematic
- Discovery-based (Correct answer)
- Multisensory
Correct answer: Discovery-based
Structured literacy is defined as explicit, systematic, sequential, cumulative, multisensory, and diagnostic, but not discovery-based, which is the antithesis of the explicit instruction required.
The IDA's definition of structured literacy identifies six key instructional principles: explicit meaning directly taught, systematic meaning a logical scope and sequence, sequential meaning from simple to complex, cumulative meaning building on prior learning, multisensory meaning engaging multiple learning channels simultaneously, and diagnostic meaning responsive to ongoing assessment. Discovery-based learning is explicitly not a feature of structured literacy.
CALT Principles of Multisensory Structured Language (MSL) Education 2
The term multisensory in MSL education refers to the simultaneous engagement of:
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