Reading and Language Arts on the GACE® Test
As you prepare for the Reading and Language Arts portion of the GACE, you may have some questions or concerns about what to expect. We hope to alleviate your concerns and help you feel more confident and prepared through our free study guides, flashcards, and practice questions. Here are a few more things to consider.
Know Your Stuff
You are a talented, educated person who brings a wealth of knowledge to the education realm. Although you may not have a lot of hands-on experience teaching students in the classroom, the GACE test also assesses your content understanding with questions that may ask you to apply grammar skills or identify point of view. Make sure you are familiar with English and Language Arts content standards and elements of teaching reading. You may have to demonstrate that you can differentiate between phonics and phonemic awareness, for example.
Understand the Current Pedagogies
You may have heard that teaching is an art. But this art has important and resonating repercussions for future generations, so the science of teaching is frequently being examined and “tweaked”. Researchers and educational professionals regularly offer updated pedagogies or best practices of teaching designed to engage and enlighten students. Make sure you’re up to date with the current theories and practices of teaching and have considered how they might be applied in the classroom.
Have a Big Picture Plan
Many of the questions on the test ask you how you would approach a teaching task and implement methods in a classroom with students as they learn to read and write. Remember that these practices should not be applied without forethought and consideration, but be selected with intentionality based on student needs. You’ll need to know the right order of approaching the teaching of reading, for example. Students won’t be able to jump to reading comprehension if they can’t identify the words correctly. And they can’t sound out the words if they don’t understand the relationship between specific letters and sounds.
Don’t Forget the Details
Additionally, consider your day-to-day classroom practices. Make sure you have a plan as to how you would strategically group students based on skills and needs, for example, or how you would help students select an appropriate book to read for an independent reading assignment. These kinds of daily details, decisions that will eventually come as second nature, will be assessed on the test.
You’ve Got This!
The GACE test in Reading and Language Arts assesses not only your content knowledge as a professional in the field, but also your ability to consider and apply different and appropriate practices to help support student learning. It’s not only an assessment of your understanding of disciplinary content and teaching practices, but a measure of how and under what circumstances you would apply those practices to help students access and learn the content successfully.
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