Reading, Language Arts, & Writing: Praxis 5001 Terms + Definitions

Phonological Awareness

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

Phonemic Awareness

Understanding the individual sounds, or phonemes, in words.

Phonics

Understanding the relationship between sounds and the spelling patterns representing those sounds.

Phonemes

The individual sounds in words.

Syllables

Unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound.

Onsets

The beginning consonant and consonant cluster.

Rimes

The vowel and consonants that follow the onset.

Blending

The ability to string together the sounds that each letter stands for in a word.S

Segmenting

Breaking a word apart.

Substituting

Replacing one phoneme with another in a word.

Deleting

Take words apart, remove one sound, and pronounce the word without the removed sound.

Morphology

The study of words and their forms.

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning words. For example, in the word firehouse, there are two: fire and house.

Letter-Sound-Correspondence

Certain letters and combinations of letters make specific sounds.

Spelling Conventions

The rules that English words follow.

High-Frequency Words (Sight Words)

These words occur most often in grade-level texts.

Decodable Words

Can be sounded out and follow letter-sound correspondence and spelling conventions/rules.

Roots

Parts of words, without the prefix or suffix, that provide the word’s basic meaning.

Affixes

Parts of a word added to the beginning and end of a word—prefixes and suffixes.S

Structural Analysis

The process of breaking words apart by prefixes, suffixes, and roots while interpreting meaning.