Terms

Academic Language: Written or spoken language that is more stylistically formal than spoken, conversational language; language that is most often used in academic discourse or text.

Advanced Phonics- The knowledge and strategies required to decode and encode multisyllabic words, including morphology and information about the meaning, pronunciation, and parts of speech of words gained from knowledge of prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

Alphabetic principle: The concept that letters are used to represent individual phonemes in the spoken word; insight into this principle is critical for learning to read and spell.

Automaticity: The ability to read quickly and accurately without conscious effort.

Background knowledge: Preexisting knowledge of facts and ideas necessary to make inferences.

Balanced Literacy: Balanced literacy is a theory of teaching reading and writing that arose in the 1990s and has a variety of interpretations.

Benchmark: A standard or a set of standards used as a threshold for predicting future risk for reading difficulty.

Code switching:The conscious effort to write and/or speak in a certain way, depending on the social context and/or whether the language is spoken or written.

Consonant: A phoneme (speech sound) that is not a vowel and that is formed by obstructing the flow of air with the teeth, lips, or tongue; English has 25 consonant phonemes.

Consonant blend:Two or three consonant phonemes before or after a vowel in a syllable (e.g., bl-, fr-, str-, -nd, -sp).

Consonant-le (Cle) syllable: An unaccented final syllable containing a consonant before l followed by silent e (e.g., ea - gle, drib - ble).

Cueing: The three cueing system for reading is based on the psycholinguistic theories of Ken Goodman & Frank Smith, first published in the 1960s. The three cueing model says that skilled reading involves gaining meaning from print using three types of cues: Semantic (word meaning and sentence context), Syntactic (grammatical features)Grapho-phonic (letters and sounds).The research evidence suggests that the three cueing systems approach to reading is counterproductive.

Curriculum-based measurements (CBMs): Standardized measurements that assess content that students should master by the end of the grade level that the measurement represents; requires standard administration and scoring.

Decodable Text: a type of text used in beginning reading instruction. Decodable texts are carefully sequenced to progressively incorporate words that are consistent with the letter–sound relationships that have been taught to the new reader.

Decoding: The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences.

Diagnostic decoding survey: A diagnostic tool that is used as a screening test to measure decoding with a large group of students, or for in-depth diagnosis with individual students; also known as a diagnostic phonics survey.

Discourse: Written or spoken communication or the exchange of information and ideas, usually longer than a sentence, between individuals or between the writer and the reader.

Double deficit: A combination of phonological and naming-speed deficits. See also single deficit.

Dysgraphia: A breakdown in the communication pathways between the minds image of a letter and the hands ability to produce that letter in written form.

Explicit Instruction: deliberate teaching of all concepts with continuous student-teacher interaction.

Expressive vocabulary: The words one uses in speaking and writing.

Foundational Skills: A set of skills students must master before they can become fluent readers. These skills include print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition and fluency.

Foundational writing skills: The skills necessary to transcribe or encode words into written symbols, using phonological, orthographic, morphological, and syntactic aspects of language.

Grapheme: A letter or letter combination that spells a phoneme; can be one, two, three, or four letters in English (e.g., e, ei, igh, eigh).

Graphomotor skill: The skill of manually forming the letters that represent written language.

High-frequency words: Words that occur most often in written English, including articles, common nouns, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary (helping) verbs.

Hourglass Figure: See theoretical models page

Leveled reading: A practice by which children are assigned books that best match their reading level. This reading level is a student's instructional reading level. Research indicates leveled reading is not an effective practice.

Lexical quality: The nature of a stored word image in the brain. A high-quality representation of a word in memory enables orthographic mapping better than a partial or poorly elaborated word image.

Lexicon: The name for the mental dictionary in every persons phonological processing system.

Listening Comprehension: The capacity to understand spoken language which develops through conversation, hearing and sharing personal stories and interaction with text.

Low-frequency words: Words that do not occur often in printed text, and which are likely to be found only in text concerning a specific topic.

Macroprocesses: Thought processes and/or activities by which students process and transform new information so that it is owned.

Mental model: The mental representation of a texts meaning that locates those meanings within a wide context of time, place, and circumstance. Also known as situation model.

Metacognition: The act of monitoring and assessing ones own awareness and thought processes.

Metalinguistic awareness: The ability to think about and reflect on the structure of language itself. The invention of the alphabet was an achievement in metalinguistic awareness.

Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language; it may be a word or a part of a word; it may be a single sound (e.g., plural /s/), one syllable (e.g., suffix -ful), or multiple syllables (e.g., prefix inter-).

Morphology: The study of meaningful units in a language and how the units are combined in word formation.

MSV: See Cueing

Norm-referenced tests: Standardized tests that are designed to compare and rank test-takers in relation to each other.

Orthographic mapping: The mental process used to store words for immediate and effortless retrieval. It requires phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and the mechanism for sight word learning.

Orthography: A writing system for representing language.

Phoneme: A speech sound that combines with others in a language system to make words; English has 40 to 44 phonemes, according to various linguists.

Phoneme-grapheme mapping: The matching of phonemes (sounds) in words with the graphemes (letters) that represent them.

Phonemic awareness: The conscious awareness of the individual speech sounds (consonants and vowels) in spoken syllables and the ability to consciously manipulate those sounds.

Phonetics: The study of the sounds of human speech; articulatory phonetics refers to the way the sounds are physically produced in the human vocal tract.

Phonics: The study of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent; also used as a descriptor for code-based instruction.

Phonological awareness: The conscious awareness of all levels of the speech sound system, including word boundaries, stress patterns, syllables, onset-rime units, and phonemes.

Phonological lexicon: The brains storehouse of words previously heard, but not necessarily understood.

Phonological processing: Multiple functions of speech and language perception and production, such as perceiving, interpreting, storing (remembering), recalling or retrieving, and generating the speech sound system of a language.

Phonological working memory (PWM): The online memory system that remembers speech long enough to extract meaning from it, or that holds onto words during writing; a function of the phonological processing system.

Phonology: The rule system within a language by which phonemes can be sequenced, combined, and pronounced to make words.

Pragmatics: The system of rules and conventions for using language and related gestures in a social context.

Predictable Text: Text constructed to encourage beginning readers to memorize whole words and sentences and to use picture cues to 'read' unknown words

Prosody: The rhythms and patterns of sounds in spoken language; expression.

Qualitative spelling screener: A list of words with a variety of orthographic patterns, specifically designed to assess students spelling levels and knowledge of those patterns.

Rapid automatic naming (RAN): The ability to quickly name a series of printed, repeated numbers, letters, or objects that should be known by rote.

Reading rope: See theoretical models page

Receptive vocabulary: The words whose meanings one can recognize when reading or listening to others speak.

Reliable measure: A measure that is likely to yield the same result if it were to be given several times on the same day in the same context. See also valid measure.

Schema: A mental model or conceptual framework for a specific topic or idea.

Schwa: The empty vowel in an unaccented syllable, such as the last syllable in wagon or rebus.

Semantic lexicon: The brains mental dictionary of word meanings, including synonyms and related mental concepts.

Semantics: The study of word and phrase meanings and relationships.

Sight vocabulary: A students bank of words that are instantly and effortlessly recognized; includes both regularly spelled and irregularly spelled words.

Simple View of Reading: See theoretical models page

Simple View of Writing: See theoretical models page

Single deficit: A prominent and specific weakness in either phonological processing or rapid print (naming-speed) processing. See also double deficit.

Socioeconomic status (SES): Refers to a combination of the education, income, and occupation of an individual or a social group.

Stuctured Literacy: Explicit, systematic teaching that focuses on phonological awareness, word recognition, phonics and decoding, spelling, and syntax. Structured Literacy instruction is known to be effective for all readers.

Syllable: The unit of pronunciation that is organized around a vowel; it may or may not have a consonant after the vowel.

Syntax: The system of rules governing permissible word order in sentences.

Valid measure: A measure that measures what was intended (construct validity); corresponds well to other known, valid measures (concurrent validity); and predicts with good accuracy how students are likely to perform on an accountability measure (predictive validity). See also reliable measure.

Vocabulary: Knowledge of, and memory for, word meanings.

Vowel: One of a set of 15 vowel phonemes in English, not including r-controlled combinations or schwa; an open phoneme that is the heart of every spoken syllable; classified by tongue position and height (e.g., high to low, and front to back).

Vowel team: A combination of two, three, or four letters that stand for a vowel (e.g., au, ea, oo, eigh).

Vowel team syllable: A syllable with a long or short vowel spelling that uses 2-4 letters to spell the vowel sound (e.g., toy, light, four - teen); includes diphthongs ou/ow and oi/oy.

Vowel-consonant-e (VCe): A common pattern for spelling a long vowel sound (e.g., rate, ice).

Vowel-consonant-e (VCe) syllable: A syllable with a long vowel spelled with one vowel plus one consonant plus silent e (e.g., note, fire - place).

Vowel-r combination: A single vowel letter followed by r (ar, er, ir, or, ur) that stands for a unique vowel sound.

Vowel-r syllable:A syllable with er, ir, or, ar, or ur (e.g., for, start); the vowel sound before the letter r often changes its pronunciation.