Foundation Reading Skills and Terms

Alphabet Knowledge

Connecting letter names, sounds, and forms

Example: “The letter B spells /b/, like at the beginning of ball.”

Fluency

Reading with accuracy, automaticity, and prosody

Example: Reading like an adult with the appropriate speed and expression for the particular text

Morphology

Identifying and manipulating morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in language

Example: “The word helpful can be broken into two parts, both for meaning and for

decoding: help and ful.”

Oral Language

Producing and comprehending spoken language, including vocabulary and grammar

Example: Everything related to understanding and using spoken language

Sound-Spelling Knowledge

Knowing how to represent sounds in oral language with spellings

Example: “The letters o-u can spell the sound /ow/ like in the word loud.”

Phonics

Instruction in sound-spelling relationships

Examples: Practices that relate sounds to spellings to read and spell words

Graphemes

Written representation of a sound

Example: Graphemes include individual letters and combinations of letters that spell

phonemes.

Phonological Awareness

Identifying and manipulating units of sound in oral language

Example: Manipulating words, word parts, and phonemes

Phonemic Awareness

A subset of phonological awareness—identifying and manipulating phonemes, the smallest unit of sound in oral language

Example: “The word dog has three phonemes: /d/ /o/ /g/.”