When a student misreads the word revisit, what instructional focus should the teacher emphasize and why?

• A. Focus on Speed and Fluency
• B. Focus on Root Word Identification or Decoding Skills
• C. Emphasize Comprehension Strategies
• D. Increase Vocabulary Memorization

Answer: (B)

When a student misreads a word such as revisit, the focus should be on decoding skills and identifying the word’s parts—the prefix and the root. This word clearly contains a common prefix re- and a root visit, so teaching the student to break the word into prefix + root, sound it out, and blend the parts helps them pronounce and recognize it correctly. Strengthening phonemic awareness and decoding strategies enables the reader to handle multisyllabic words with prefixes, improving accuracy across similar words in the future.

This approach targets the immediate issue: the student is not decoding the word accurately. Focusing on speed and fluency emphasizes faster reading once decoding is solid, but it won’t fix a misread. Comprehension strategies matter after decoding is reliable, and memorizing vocabulary won’t address the underlying decoding challenge for this word.