Illinois Certification Testing System (ICTS) – Sample

Which of the following theories of learning
emphasizes the roles of background
knowledge and context in the reading
process?

An eighth grade student has weak phonics
skills. A variety of the language arts
teacher’s instructional strategies have been
unsuccessful in improving the student’s
ability to rapidly decode unfamiliar,
phonetically regular words. This teacher
could best respond by taking which of the
following steps next?

An English teacher designs an activity in
which students work together to identify
as many words as possible that share a
common root (e.g., transport, portable,
export). This activity is most likely to
promote students’ vocabulary development
by helping the students learn to:

An eighth grade student who is a
struggling reader will participate in a
program in which older students read
aloud predictable or rhyming books to
early-elementary students. This activity
is most likely to promote the eighth grade
student’s reading development in which
of the following ways?

Which of the following types of instructional
activities for middle school students
is likely to be most effective in promoting
the students’ oral reading fluency?

A high school English teacher could
best model how to apply comprehension
strategies such as predicting and
questioning by:

As part of an essay-writing assignment,
a high school student has selected a main
idea but is having difficulty figuring out
which details to include. Which of the
following prewriting strategies is likely
to be most effective in addressing this
difficulty?

Read the passage below; then answer the two questions that follow.
1It is not often that the publication of a single book marks an important turning point in the emergence of a major social movement. 2But Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did just that. 3Unlike most books, Friedan struck a nerve in her widely read work. 4In the book, she used a number of case studies to examine the alienation felt by many American housewives. 5These were women who had been told that marriage and family provided all one could reasonably expect from life and later found that it did not. 6Friedan’s book tried to explain this discrepancy by looking at the ways in which educators, women’s magazines, and advertisers manipulated the feminine mystique to convince women that happiness was a house filled with the latest consumer goods. 7The women who responded to Friedan’s message did not immediately take their case into the streets. 8They did, however, begin to reexamine their lives. 9Many also began searching, often outside the home, for new means of achieving the sense of fulfillment they had been promised.
Which of the following sentences should
be revised to correct a misplaced
modifier?

Which of the following revisions is
needed to correct an error in usage?

Which of the following statements best
describes the most important advantage
of posting student writing on a Web site?