EDUC 304 Vocabulary

Student friendly explanation

using simple everyday language rather than the sophisticated language often used in academic dictionaries

Accuracy

Pronouncing written words correctly.

Affix

word-parts that change the meaning of the words they attach to.

Alphabetic principle

The idea that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language.

Automaticity

The ability to rapidly, effortlessly and accurately recognise or decode words.

Background knowledge

The amount of information or knowledge someone has on a particular topic. Acquired by the amount of experience one has in life or the amount of knowledge they have retained from reading, listening or experiencing.

Base word

A word that can stand alone and has meaning; prefixes and suffixes can be added to alter its meaning

Blending

The process or act of combining individual sounds (phonemes) or syllables to form a new word

Closed syllable

A syllable that ends with a consonant, therefore causing the vowel sound in the word to be short.

Comparing

The process of identifying similarities and differences between two or more things

Comprehension

The ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning

Connected Text

A group of sentences that relate to one another

Consonant

A basic speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed and which can be combined with a vowel to form a syllable.

Consonant blend

Composed of two or three consonant graphemes that precede or follow a vowel within a syllable. For example, st-op and str-ing have consonant blends at the beginning of the word, and ki-nd and unke-mpt gave them at the end.

Consonant digraph

Two consonants next to each other that work together to make one sound. The most common beginning readers need to recognize are wh, ch, ph, sh, th, and ck.

Continuous sounds

Sounds or phonemes that can be stretched out or elongated

Contrasting

Comparing two things in order to show the differences between them

Decodable text or book

Simple books that are written for the beginning reader and contain the specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences students have learned. Provides learners with the opportunity to use their developing segmenting and blending skills to read words.

Decoding

The process of translating print into speech by rapidly matching a letter or combination of letters (graphemes) to their sounds (phonemes) and recognizing the patterns that make syllables and words

Digraph

Two letters that make one sound.

Dolch word list

220 most frequently found words in books that children read

Encoding

The process of using individual sounds and letters to build and write words.

Explicit phonics

Involves teaching students the relationships between graphemes and morphemes

Fluency

The ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression

Fry word list

A more modern list of words than the Dolch list, and was extended to capture the more common 1,000 words.

Grapheme

A written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme). This can be a single letter or could be a sequence of letters.

High frequency words

Those words that occur most frequently in written texts.

Homograph

A word that has the same spelling as another word but has a different sound and a different meaning

Homonym

Words that sound alike or are spelled alike but have different meanings. In a word both sounds and spelling is the same as another word.

Homophone

A word that has the same sound as another word but has a different meaning. They may or may not have the same spelling.

Implicit Phonics

Also known as analytical phonics, moving from the whole word to the smallest part of the word. Students try and figure out phonics sounds on their own. The students goal is to analyze words and look for a common phoneme in a set of the words.

Inference

We learn about some things by observing or experiencing them first-hand. When we reach conclusions based on evidence and reasoning.

Invented Spelling

The practice of children using incorrect and unusual spellings for words.

Irregular Words

Do not fit the typical letter-sound correspondence that students have learned.

Letter-sound correspondence

The relationship of the letters in the alphabet to the sounds they produce, a key component of the alphabetic principle and learning to read.

Metacognition

The act of thinking about how we think

Modeling

The teacher engages students by showing them how to perform a skill while describing each step with a rationale.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning within a word

Morphology

The study of words and their parts

Open syllable

Ends with a vowel sound that is spelled with a single vowel letter (a,e,i,o,u)

Onset

The initial consonant sound, digraph, or blend that comes before a vowel sound

Orthographic mapping

The process of storing a word permanently in member for instant retrieval - and key to effortless, accurate, and fluent reading.

Orthography

the act of writing words with proper letters according to standard usage

Phoneme

an individual speech sound

Phoneme-grapheme correspondence

As children are developing early literacy skills, they begin to associate speech sounds they hear with the letters and letter combinations they see.

Pillars of reading

Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Comprehension equation

D(decoding) x LC(language comprehension) = R(reading with meaning)

Phonemic Awareness

The ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken words.

Phonics

A method for teaching children to read and write by teaching them the relationship between sounds and letters.

Phonogram

A symbol representing a vocal sound

Phonological Awareness

The ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken language.

Prosody

The ability to read with expression, using the right rhythm, tone, emphasis, pitch, and timing to convey meaning. It is a key component of reading fluency, and is considered a hallmark of reading achievement.

Progress Monitoring

Used to assess students' academic performance, quantify their rates of improvement or progress toward goals, and determine how they are responding to instruction.

Readability Level

A measurement of how easy a piece of text is to understand, often expressed as a grade level, which indicates the approximate education level needed to comfortably read the text; essentially, it tells you how complex the language is in a given text based on factors like sentence length and word difficulty.

Regular Words

Words that can be decoded using knowledge of phonics pattern (e.g. get, well, which, before)

Retelling

A reading comprehension strategy that involves students orally recalling a story in their own words.

Rate

Also known as reading speed, is the speed at which someone reads, measured in words per minute.

Reading strategies

A series of intentional mental processes or behaviors that help readers understand what they are reading

Rhyming

Words that have the same ending sound

Rime

The part of a single-syllable word that starts with the vowel and goes towards the end of the word.

Scaffolding

the support that is given to students in order for them to arrive at the correct answer. This support may occur as immediate, specific feedback that a teacher offers during stude

Scanning

A technique where you quickly move your eyes across a text to locate specific information, like a particular name, date or key phrase, without reading every word.

Science of Reading

A vast interdisciplinary scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. It includes the BIG 5 as these should be included according to the research when teaching kids to read.

Scope and Sequence

A "road map" or "blueprint" for teachers that provides an overall picture of an instructional program and includes the range of teaching content and the order or sequence in which it is taught.

Skimming

A reading technique that involves a quick scan of a text with the purpose of identifying the main ideas.

Suffix

A group of letters added to the end of a word to modify it, change its meaning, and alter its grammatical function in a sentence.

Syntax

The rule system that governs how words and phrases are arranged into clauses and sentences.

Universal Screening

An informal inventory that provides the teacher a beginning indication of the students preparation for grade level reading instruction. It is a "first alert" that a child may need extra help to make adequate progress in reading during the year.

Sight Words

These are the words that are recognized immediately after orthographic mapping. Sometimes thought to be irregular, or high frequency words (e.g., Dolch and Fry list.) However, any word that is recognized automatically is a sight word. These words may be phonetically regular or irregular.

Syllable

A segment of a word that contains one vowel sound. The vowel may or may not be preceded and/or followed by a consonant.

Syllable types

There are six syllable types: Closed, Open, Vowel-consonant-e (VCE), R-Controlled, vowel team and final stable.

Think-alouds

During shared read aloud, teachers reveal their thinking process by verbalizing: connections, questions, inferences and predictions.

Timed reading

Student reads appropriate text with a predetermined number of words to be read within a specific amount of time.

Vocabulary

An important focus of literacy teaching and refers to the knowledge or words, including their structure (morphology), use (grammar), meanings(semantics), and links to other words (words/semantic relationships. Key for comprehension!

Vowel

A speech sound produced without obstruction of airflow with vibration of the vocal cords.

Word Family

Group of words that share a rime (a vowel plus the consonants that follow) Examples: -ame, -ick, and -out

Word work

The act of deliberately analyzing words, generally for practice in decoding or encoding.