Which foundational skills may appear on the CST in certain grade spans?

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Foundational reading skills are the building blocks that let students move from recognizing letters to reading smoothly. The skills listed—phonemic awareness (hearing and manipulating sounds in words), phonics (linking those sounds to letters), decoding (sounding out and pronouncing unfamiliar words), fluency (reading with speed, accuracy, and expression), and word recognition (recognizing common words by sight)—toster together to support early reading development and ongoing literacy across grade spans. On the CST, these may appear in certain grade spans as students develop from decoding to fluent reading, which is essential for comprehension. The other options don’t fit because advanced computational linguistics is not a foundational skill taught in early grades, punctuation usage alone isn’t a core reading foundation, and historical analysis is a higher-order task, not a baseline skill for learning to read.