EDST 2004 Midterm Study Guide: Key Concepts and Instructional Strategies

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the core reading instruction concepts, emergent literacy, fluency strategies, word recognition processes, and lesson design principles from the EDST 2004 midterm study guide.

Cognitive-Constructivist View of Reading

A theoretical perspective positing that reading is an active, meaning-making process where readers construct meaning by synthesizing textual information with their own background knowledge and cognitive strategies.

Constructivism

A learning theory asserting that learners actively build and construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world through experience, reflection, and schema integration.

Automaticity

The fast, effortless, and accurate recognition of words, which frees up cognitive resources and working memory for reading comprehension.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The range of tasks that a learner cannot yet perform entirely independently, but can successfully accomplish with appropriate instructional guidance and scaffolding.

Gradual Release of Responsibility

An instructional model ('I Do, We Do, You Do') that shifts cognitive work from the teacher to the student through direct explanation, cognitive modeling, scaffolding, contextualizing, reviewing, and practicing.

Teaching for Transfer

Instructional practices designed to enable students to apply learned reading strategies, concepts, and skills to new, novel, or authentic literacy contexts.

Phoneme

The smallest individual unit of sound in a spoken language that distinguishes one word or syllable from another (e.g., vowels and consonants).

Phonemic Awareness

A subcategory of phonological awareness focused on the ability to identify, isolate, segment, blend, and manipulate individual speech sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

Phonological Awareness

An overarching, umbrella metacognitive awareness of the sound structure of spoken language, encompassing awareness of rhymes, syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes.

Phonics

An instructional approach that explicitly teaches the relationship between the written letters or letter combinations (graphemes) and the sounds they represent (phonemes) to aid in decoding.

Alphabetic Principle

The understanding that spoken words are composed of individual phonemes, and that these sounds are systematically represented by written letters and letter patterns.

Invented Spelling

Developmental or phonetic spelling attempts produced by young children using their current knowledge of letter-sound correspondences before learning conventional spelling.

Fluency

The ability to read connected text with accuracy, appropriate speed (rate), and proper expression (prosody), thereby facilitating comprehension.

Prosody

The expressive component of oral reading, characterized by appropriate phrasing, rhythm, stress, inflection, and intonation.

Repeated Reading

An instructional strategy where a student reads a specific passage aloud multiple times until achieving a designated level of accuracy, speed, and expression.

Partner Reading

A cooperative learning practice in which two peers take turns reading aloud to each other, offering support, feedback, and modeling fluent reading.

Choral Reading

An instructional technique where students and the teacher read a text aloud together in unison, providing a scaffold for fluency and expression.

Readers Theater

A fluency-building activity in which students practice, rehearse, and perform a dramatic script through oral reading without costumes, props, or memorization.

WCPM

Words Correct Per Minute; a standardized quantitative metric used to assess and monitor a student's oral reading fluency rate and accuracy.

Science of Reading

A comprehensive, interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research from cognitive science, education, and neuroscience explaining how children learn to read and how reading should be taught.

Reading Wars

The historical and ongoing debate over the most effective way to teach reading, centering on phonics instruction versus whole language, balanced literacy, and evidence-based science of reading approaches.

5 Pillars of Reading

The five essential, evidence-based components of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.

Decoding

The cognitive process of applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to translate printed letter strings into their corresponding spoken words.

Phonology

The study and rule-governed system of speech sounds and sound patterns within a given language.

Orthography

The conventional spelling system and written conventions of a language.

Onset and Rime

The structural divisions of a syllable: the onset is the initial consonant sound(s) preceding the vowel, and the rime is the vowel and any subsequent consonant sounds.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful grammatical unit in a language that cannot be divided further without losing its meaning, including root words and affixes.

Inflectional Suffix

A bound grammatical ending added to a base word that alters tense, number, or degree (such as plural -s or past-tense -ed) without changing the word's grammatical category.

Derivational Suffix

An affix added to the end of a root word that creates a new word or changes the word's fundamental meaning and grammatical category (e.g., teach to teacher).

Developmental Phases in Learning to Read Words

The sequential stages of word reading development identified by Linnea Ehri: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic phases.

Consonant Digraph

A pair of consonant letters that come together to represent a single, unique speech sound (e.g., sh, ch, th, wh).

Consonant Blend

A sequence of two or more consonants appearing together where each individual consonant sound is distinctly pronounced and heard (e.g., bl, str, cl).

Diphthong

A complex vowel sound in which the tongue and lips glide from one vowel position to another within the same syllable (e.g., /oi/ in coin, /ou/ in shout).

CVCe Pattern

The consonant-vowel-consonant-silent 'e' spelling pattern ('Magic E') where the final silent 'e' signals that the preceding vowel represents a long vowel sound.

Backward Design

A lesson planning framework that begins by identifying the desired learning outcomes and objectives, then determining acceptable assessment evidence, and finally planning instructional activities.

Alignment Between Objective and Assessment

The intentional congruence in curriculum planning ensuring that the assessment directly and accurately evaluates the exact target skills or content specified in the learning objective.