What skill does covering a word at the end of a sentence and asking for predictions primarily help students develop?

Covering a word at the end of a sentence and prompting students for predictions primarily supports the development of contextual word identification skills. This approach encourages students to use the context of the sentence—the surrounding words and overall message—to infer the missing word. By engaging in this prediction process, students learn to utilize context clues to make educated guesses about unfamiliar or partially revealed vocabulary.

This skill is crucial because it not only enhances vocabulary acquisition but also helps students improve their reading fluency and understanding. They learn to appreciate how the meaning of sentences is often derived from more than just isolated words, fostering a deeper grasp of language.

In contrast, phonetic decoding focuses on the ability to sound out words based on their letters, while visual word recognition emphasizes familiarity with shapes and forms of words. Overall comprehension involves understanding the text as a whole, which is indeed supported by the skill being developed through contextual word identification, but the specific activity of making predictions from context directly targets the ability to identify words based on surrounding information.