North Carolina Foundations of Reading Practice Test

Analogizing helps students to:

1. Memorize vocabulary words.

2. Identify groups of letters that form a word family.

3. Read fluently with expression.

4. Improve their spelling skills.

The correct answer is: Identify groups of letters that form a word family.

Analogizing plays a vital role in developing phonemic awareness and word recognition skills, which is why identifying groups of letters that form a word family is the most relevant outcome. When students learn to recognize how words are related through shared spelling patterns or phonetic structures, they can effectively predict and decode new words. This recognition of word families—such as 'cat,' 'bat,' and 'hat'—enables students to leverage their understanding of familiar words to make informed guesses about unfamiliar ones, thereby enhancing their overall literacy skills. While the other options may have their own merits, they do not capture the specific benefit that analogizing provides in the context of literacy development. For instance, memorizing vocabulary or improving spelling skills may involve different strategies that do not necessarily connect to the process of understanding relationships among words. Similarly, reading fluently with expression is more closely linked to aspects of prosody and phrasing rather than the analytical skill of identifying word families through analogy.