A phonics diagnostic shows a third-grade student reads real words accurately but struggles with nonsense words. Which conclusions are supported?

A phonics diagnostic shows a third-grade student reads real words accurately but struggles with nonsense words. Which conclusions are supported?

• A. It requires decoding skills
• B. It indicates not memorized whole words
• C. Both of the above
• D. Neither of the above

Answer: (C)

Reading real words can come from remembering familiar whole-word forms or from decoding using letter-sound rules. Nonsense words, however, have no stored word form to memorize, so they must be sounded out. If a third-grade student reads real words accurately but struggles with nonsense words, it suggests they can access known words but have difficulty applying phoneme-sound rules to unfamiliar letter strings. That shows decoding skills are at play for new words, and it also indicates they haven’t relied on memorized whole-word representations for those unfamiliar items. So both conclusions are supported.

Reading real words can come from remembering familiar whole-word forms or from decoding using letter-sound rules. Nonsense words, however, have no stored word form to memorize, so they must be sounded out. If a third-grade student reads real words accurately but struggles with nonsense words, it suggests they can access known words but have difficulty applying phoneme-sound rules to unfamiliar letter strings. That shows decoding skills are at play for new words, and it also indicates they haven’t relied on memorized whole-word representations for those unfamiliar items. So both conclusions are supported.