Reading, Language, and Writing: 240 Study Guide (Praxis 5001)

Literacy Development

The progression in which students build reading, writing, and oral language(s) skills over time.

Literacy Development Skills

Alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, and fluency.

Literacy Development Stages

Emergent, early (beginning), fluent, and proficient.

Emergent Literacy Development

Expanding vocabulary, recognizing environmental print and directionality, rhyming, syllables, and identifying initial sounds in words.

Early (Beginning) Literacy Development

Tracking print, word segmenting, blending and segmenting simple phonemes, and mapping sounds to letters; decoding CVC words.

Fluent Literacy Development

Recognizing high-frequency words, decoding multi-syllabic words, reading with appropriate accuracy, and prosody.

Proficient Literacy Development

Applying advanced word analysis and morphology, reading effortlessly and automatically, and using content-specific academic vocabulary.

Phonological Awareness

A skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language, parts of words, syllables, onsets, and rimes.

Phonemes

The smallest individual sounds in a word.

Rhyme

The ability to understand when words rhyme or sound the same at the end.

Alliteration

The ability to identify when words have the same first sound.

Word Awareness

Knowing that individual words make up a sentence.

Syllable Awareness

The ability to hear the individual units with vowel sounds that make up a word.

Onsets

The beginning consonant and consonant cluster.

Rimes

The vowel and consonants that follow the onset.

Phonemic Awareness

The ability to hear and use individual units of sounds, or phonemes.

Phoneme Isolation

The ability to separate a single sound in a position of a word.

Phoneme Blending

The ability to blend individual sounds to make a word.

Phoneme Segmentation

The ability to break down a word into separate sounds.

Phoneme Addition

The ability to add one phoneme to a word.

Phoneme Deletion

The ability to remove a phoneme from a word.

Phoneme Substitution

The ability to replace a phoneme in a word with another.

Phoneme Manipulation

Phoneme addition, deletion, and substitution.

A strong predictor of reading success.

Phonological awareness

Invented Spelling

A child’s attempt to spell based on their best judgment or what they do know about letter-sound correspondence.

Spelling Development Stages

Precommunicative spelling, semi-phonetic spelling, phonetic spelling, transitional spelling, and conventional spelling.

Pre-communicative Spelling

Uses letters from the alphabet to represent words without demonstrating knowledge of letter-sound correspondence. The words appear as random strings of letters.

Semi-Phonetic Spelling

It is common to see single letters used to represent whole words, syllables, or sounds in which multiple letters are conventionally used. Some knowledge of letter-sound correspondence is apparent in a child’s attempt to spell.

Phonetic Spelling

Uses a letter or group of letters to represent every sound heard in a word. Spelling choices still may not be conventional, but they are easily understood through the lens of letter-sound correspondence.

Transitional Spelling

A child moves from depending solely on knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to incorporating knowledge of word structure and common visual representations of words in their spelling as well. Misspellings are still common and frequent.

Conventional Spelling

A child applies knowledge of letter-sound relationships, general spelling rules, and morphology in their spelling. The child is better to recognize misspellings, and the spelling in their writing is generally correct.

WIDA Levels

Entering, emerging, developing, expanding, bridging, and reaching.

WIDA Level: Entering

Level 1. Student has a very minimum grasp of the language. They can understand pictures and graphs and use short words or phrases. These students can follow easy, one-step directions and answer simple questions like “Who is your friend?” or “Where is the puppy?”

WIDA Level: Emerging

Level 2. Student begins to use language associated with content areas. He can write and speak in short phrases or sentences. May begin to follow more complicated directions or questions, but will still struggle with syntax, semantics, or phonology. Student still needs visual or graphic aids to understand material.

WIDA Level: Developing

Level 3. Topical language advances, but still has room for improvement. Sentences are longer and begin to become more complex. Occasional errors may hinder communication, but the student is understandable most of the time.

WIDA Level: Expanding

Level 4. Student begins to use technical language related to the content area and can use a variety of sentence lengths and structures. She can write longer paragraphs and makes fewer grammatical, semantic, or phonological errors.

WIDA Level: Bridging

Level 5. Skills are almost the same as peers of the same age whose native language is English. May still need some supports.

WIDA Level: Reaching

Level 6. Language skills are comparable to her peers. She can use a variety of sentences and write or speak for an extended period of time about the same topic. Uses technical language of content areas accurately.