Struggling Readers Parent Team Glossary
(The following is a list of terms that parents may encounter relating to this field. It is not necessarily all-inclusive.)
504 Plan - Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a national law that protects qualified individuals from discrimination based on their disability. In the educational setting this means that schools must allow certain accommodations based on a diagnosed condition that meets these qualifications. A 504 plan is part of regular education, not special education. For more information we recommend the Wrights Law website for a more detailed description.
Accommodations - 1.) Techniques and materials that allow individuals to complete school or work tasks with greater ease and effectiveness. Examples include spellcheckers, tape recorders, and expanded time for completing assignments. 2.) Changes in the method or duration of instruction or testing that allow a student to demonstrate what they really know. Accommodations can include extra time, change of location, having questions read or presented in a different media (visual, audio, tactile) and use of technology such as a laptop instead of pen and paper. Accommodations do not lower the expectations or level of skill being tested.
ADHD - ADHD is a chronic condition relating to both the ability to focus attention and to gross motor activity. It includes a number of behavioral elements including difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity, impulsive and inattentive behavior.
Assessment - The process of documenting a student’s achievement and other abilities.
Assistive Technology - Technology that supports any activity including physical movement, reading, writing, spelling and mathematics.
Auditory - related to the sense of hearing.
Auditory Discrimination - The ability to hear likenesses and differences in phonemes or words.
Auditory Dyslexia - Auditory dyslexia involves difficulty processing sounds of letters or groups of letters. Multiple sounds may be fused as a singular sound. For example the word 'back' will be heard as a single sound rather than something made up of the sounds 'b' - 'aa' -'ck'.
Automaticity- the ability to perform a skill quickly and accurately without having to think about it. Automaticity can refer to reading, spelling, handwriting, recalling math facts, or any other foundational skill.
Benchmarks - Major milestones that specify skill or performance level a student needs to accomplish a goal.
Blending - Moving from one sound to another to make a word: “P” “I” “g” = pig. The student must be able to hold onto the sounds to read the word.
Cognitive - thinking and mental processing
Comprehension - understanding what is read (Reading Comprehension) or heard (Listening Comprehension)
Comprehension Deficit - Poor understanding of what was read.
Decode - The ability to use letter-sound relationships to translate a written word into a spoken word. It is commonly described as the ability to "sound out" a new word.
Decoding - The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences. It is also the act of deciphering a new word by sounding it out.
Diagnosis - the identification of the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms.
Direct Instruction - Telling a student directly what you want him to know instead of waiting for him to discover it.
Dyscalculia - Extreme difficulty learning or comprehending mathematics/arithmetic. Sometimes it is referred to as math dyslexia. It often occurs together with dyslexia, dysgraphia and attention deficit disorder (ADD), though it is a separate learning challenge.
Dysgraphia - Difficulty writing, or very messy writing, that is often illegible and incomprehensible, caused in part by weak fine motor skills and difficulty memorizing sequences. It is a specific learning disability, distinct from dyslexia and attention deficit disorder (ADD) but often occurs together with them.
Dyslexia - Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. It is most commonly due to a difficulty in phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects an individual’s ability to speak, read, spell, and often, learn a second language. Dyslexia is highly prevalent, affecting 20% of the population. Dyslexia represents 80-90 percent of all learning disabilities and differs from the others in its specificity and scientific validation. While those with dyslexia are slow readers, they also, paradoxically, often are very fast and creative thinkers with excellent reasoning skills.
Dysphonetic Dyslexia - Difficulty processing sounds into words. Results from difficulty remembering sounds and manipulating/ blending them into words. Sometimes called auditory dyslexia. This is the most common type of dyslexia and is hereditary & developmental.
Encoding - To spell using the auditory sense to help put together the components of a word.The opposite of decoding, to “sound out” a word in order to spell it.
Evaluation - Used to determine whether or not a student has a disability and, if so, whether special education services are necessary. Individual multidisciplinary evaluations have major educational as well as legal significance.
Executive Functioning - The ability to organize cognitive processes. This includes the ability to plan ahead, prioritize, stop and start activities, shift from one activity to another activity, and to monitor one’s own behavior.
Expressive Language - how a child uses words to express himself/herself.
FAPE - Free and Appropriate Public Education. Students are entitled by law to free and individualized educational program in the least restricted environment that is appropriate to their abilities/ disabilities.
Fluency - A measure of the accuracy and speed (or rate) of reading. Decreased reading fluency typically reduces overall comprehension due to the additional effort and time required to read the text.
IDEA - The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 ensures students with a disability are provided with Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) that is tailored to their individual needs.
IEP - Individualized Education Plan, An IEP is a document that is developed for each public school child who needs special education, usually by a team consisting of the child’s parents, teachers and school administrators.
Intervention - Providing direct, explicit instruction to students who are not making adequate progress in reading. (See also tutoring and academic therapy)
Kinesthetic - related to moving the body
Learning Disability (LD) - A disorder that affects people’s ability to either interpret what they see and hear or to link information from different parts of the brain. It may also be referred to as a learning disorder or a learning difference.
Least Restricted Environment - The LRE is the IDEA requirement that each student with a disability be educated, as much as possible, with nondisabled peers in general education classes and activities.
Multisensory - Using the ears, eyes, and hand senses to reinforce in the brain the components of language
Multisensory Structured Language Education - An educational approach that uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile cues simultaneously to enhance memory and learning. Links are consistently made between the visual (what we see), auditory (what we hear), and kinesthetic-tactile (what we feel) pathways in learning to read and spell.
Nonsense Words - a string of letters that may resemble a conventional word but does not appear in any standard dictionary. Nonsense words are used to determine if a student is able to decode words or has memorized them.
OHI - Other Health Impairment - a medically diagnosed disability that impairs a student in the educational environment. A category of qualification for an IEP.
Orton-Gillingham Approach - An approach to reading instruction for dyslexic students developed by Samuel T. Orton (1879-1948) and Anna Gillingham (1878-1963), early pioneers in reading and language mastery. The approach is described as language-based, multi-sensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible. Many modern reading systems are based on it or incorporate key elements.
Percentile - A percentile rank reflects the percentage of other individuals who have taken the same test and received the same score or a lower score than a person’s score. Percentiles are described on a scale of 1 to 99 and are useful for illustrating one’s relative standing in a population. For example, if a child is in the 80th percentile, he or she has scored the same as or better than 80% of test takers.
Phoneme - Phonemes are the units of sound that distinguish one word from another. Phonemes are critical to reading and understanding language, but dyslexics often have trouble recognizing and differentiating between them, which can make it difficult to learn to read.
Phoneme Segmentation - The skill of being able to divide words into phonemes. Pig = “p” “I” “g.”
Phonemic Awareness - Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words. Before children are able to read print, they must be aware of how the sounds in words work. Dyslexics often struggle to develop phonemic awareness.
Phonics - the relationship between written letters and corresponding sounds (letter-sound correspondence). In reading instruction, a phonics approach teaches readers to decode words using letter-sound correspondence and to recognize exceptions from these rules.
Phonological Dyslexia - Extreme difficulty reading that is a result of phonological impairment, meaning the ability to manipulate the basic sounds of language. This type of dyslexia is synonymous with dyslexia itself.
Phonological Awareness/ Phonological Skills - Phonological awareness, a more general term than phonemic awareness, refers to the brain activity that allows one to understand, distinguish and recall sounds at the sentence, word, syllable and including phoneme, level.
Reading Therapy - This term applies to Orton-Gillingham instruction. It is different from tutoring.
Receptive Language - how a child understands language from others
Remediation - The act or process of remedying or overcoming learning disabilities or problems.
RTI - Response to Intervention, is a tiered (leveled) approach to the early identification and support of students with learning disabilities. Tier 1 refers to the standard classroom lessons and students may receive extra help in Tier 2 or Tier 3 Interventions.
Specific Learning Disability (SLD) - Specific Learning Disability, and is defined as a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in a difficulty to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations.
Special Education Services - Programs and related services that address a student’s individual differences and needs according to an IEP.
Tactile - related to the sense of touch
Vocabulary - Vocabulary refers to the words a reader knows. Listening vocabulary refers to the words a person knows when hearing them in oral speech. Speaking vocabulary refers to the words we use when we speak. Reading vocabulary refers to the words a person knows when seeing them in print. Writing vocabulary refers to the words we use in writing.
Working Memory - Working memory is another term for short-term (recent) memory. Working memory is a system for temporarily storing and managing the information required to carry out complex tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehending. Working memory is involved in the selection, initiation, and termination of storing and removing data.
Sources:
http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/dyslexics/learn-about-dyslexia/dyslexia-glossary#D
https://dyslexiaida.org/helpful-terminology/
https://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/dyslexia-facts.html
https://azdyslexiacenter.com/glossary.html
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-nonsense-word-1691295