Accuracy – The average of how many words a reader reads correctly out of how many words they read

 

Alphabetic Principle - The understanding that there is a relationship between sounds and letters



Answering questions - Teacher questioning strongly supports and advances student’s learning from reading because they give students a purpose for reading, focus students’ attention on what they are to learn, help students to think actively as they read, encourage students to monitor their comprehension, and help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know



Antonym – Two separate words with completely opposite meanings (melt/ freeze)

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Assessment – The way by which understanding and mastery of concepts/skills are measured. This can be informal or formal.
 

Automaticity - Fast, effortless word recognition (not necessarily reading with expression. As readers get better at recognizing sight words, they will become more automatic and won’t have to spend time decoding small words such as “a” or “it.”

 

Breadth – The size and scope of our vocabulary



Blending sounds - Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word

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Categorizing sounds - Children recognize the word in a set of three or four words
that has the “odd” sound
 

Choral Reading – This is when all of the students in the class or small group read the same thing at the same time. This allows students to hear how other people sound when they read
 

Comprehension - the reason for reading, and helps students understand, retain, and communicate. It can be improved through instruction/ explicit instruction that should begin in the primary grades

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Consonant Blends -  2 or 3 consonants grouped together, but each still keeps their original sound (ex. Scr)

 

Consonant Digraphs - 2+ consonants combined to make a new sound (ex. Ch)
 

Consonants - All sounds represented by letters except A, E, I, O, and U that usually have a one-to-one correspondence

 

Cooperative learning groups - Students work together to understand content, helping each other learn and apply strategies

 

Depth – The level of understanding we have of words
 

DIBELS – Some schools use the DIBELS to test their students fluency. There are multiple tests that fall under the DIBLES, such as Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF). In the ORF, students will read a passage during the span of one minute, and then will be asked to summarize what they read. In the Nonsense Word Fluency, students will be given made up words to see if they can segment the letters together to form a fluent word

Direct Vocabulary – Vocabulary learned from explicit instruction to aid in reading comprehension

 

Elkonin Boxes - Children break a word into its separate sounds, saying each sound as they tap out or count it

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ELL – English Language Learners – individuals in a school who do not consider English as their primary language

​Explicit/Implicit Teaching – Explicit teaching is more instructive and direct, and implicit is less instructive, allowing for students to uncover the material in their own ways

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"Fix-up" strategies - help students to fix any comprehension problems they have.  Some examples include: identifying where the difficulty occurs, identifying what the difficulty is, restating the difficult sentence or passage in their own words, looking back through the text, and looking forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty



Flip Books - Students can flip parts of the words over to make new words or rhymes
 

Fundations - A phonological/phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling program for the general education classroom. Lessons focus on carefully sequenced skills that include print knowledge, alphabet awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and spelling

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Generating questions - Teaching students to ask their own questions improves their active processing of the text and comprehension



Grapheme - The smallest part of written language that represents a phoneme in the spelling of the word



Graphic and semantic organizers - Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and interrelationships among concepts in a text using diagrams or other pictorial devices. Semantic are similar to graphic organizers, but they look somewhat like a spider web.  Lines connect a central concept to a variety of related ideas or events
 

Homograph – Multiple words that are pronounced and spelled the same, but only have different meanings. ( Bat as in baseball bat, and bat as in the animal)
 

Homophone – Multiple words that are pronounced the same, but have different meanings and spellings. (I, eye, aye/ to, too, two)

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Indirect Vocabulary – Words learned from everyday life situations, such as conversations, movies or books
 

Indirect/Direct Teaching – Indirect teaching correlates more with implicit teaching, and involves student initiative, direct teaching correlates with explicit teaching, and is more teacher based

​Inflected Endings – A suffix that changes the tense of the word

 

Informal Reading Inventories - Individually administered reading tests usually consisting of graded words, graded reading passages, and comprehension questions

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Knowing vs. recognizing words – individuals may recognize a word when it is presented to them in print or speech, but may not know them well enough to use them on their own
 

Lively Letters - A phonics instructional program which uses oral kinesthetics, imagery, hand cues, music, and mnemonic stories are heavily utilized to make it easier for students to learn and remember their letter sounds.
 

Modeled Reading - This is where the teacher reads to the students. They are showing how to express their voice as a fluent reader would. This includes appropriate punctuation, because many students read through punctuation



Monitoring comprehension - Knowing when you understand what you read and when you do not. "Fix-up" strategies can be used when a student realizes that they do not understand what they are reading

​Onset-Rime Division - Breaking words down into their onset (the initial consonant sound of a syllable [e.g. “c” in “cat”]) and rime (the string of letters that follow the onset, which is usually a vowel and a string of consonants [e.g. "at" in "cat"])

 

Partner Reading – Have two students pair up and take turns reading to each other. This allows them both to practice a lot of reading and still hear how other people read
 

Phoneme - The smallest part of spoken language that makes a difference in the meaning of words. The English language has about 41 phonemes



Phoneme Identity - Children recognize the same sounds in different words

​Phoneme Isolation - Children recognize individual sounds in a word

 

Phonemic Awareness - The ability to notice, think about, and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words
 

Phonics - The understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds in spoken language) and graphemes (the letters and spellings that represent those sounds in written language)
 

Phonological Awareness - Identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language (words, syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes)
 

Portfolio Assessment - There are two kinds of portfolios. 1. Process Portfolio: documents stages of learning/ progressive record of student growth.  2. Product Portfolio: Demonstrates mastery, contains only best work
 

Prosody – When a person reads a text using appropriate vocal expression

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QAR (Question Answer Relationship) - A common way of thinking and talking about sources of information for answering questions.  These are two core questions. The first is, "Is it a question I need to find in the book?" If it is, the student then determines if the answer is right there, or if they need to think and search across multiple paragraphs or pages to find the answer.  The second question is. "Is this a question I need to answer in my head?"  If so, the student then determines if it can be answered on their own or if the student needs to infer information from what the author has written

 

Reading Level – The independent level is when person is able to read the text by themselves with 95% accuracy.  The instructional level is when a person is able to read the text with help at 90% accuracy.  The frustration level is when a person is unable to read the text with better than 80% accuracy
 

Reading Speed – How quickly someone can read a text



Reciprocal teaching - An instructional method that involves guided practice of reading comprehension using four concrete steps of clarification, questioning, summarizing and predicting



Recognizing story structure - Recognizing story structure (the way the content and events of a story are organized into a plot) gives students great appreciation, understanding and memory for stories

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Repeated Reading – Having a student read and reread a passage. This helps them recognize words by seeing them over and over again. When they read the word correctly, they will begin to remember it. The teacher should be providing guidance throughout
 

Rhyming - Forming words that have the same ending sound



Segmenting sounds - Children break a word into its separate sounds, saying each sound as they tap out or count it

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Semantic Mapping – A visual tool that helps readers draw on background knowledge of a topic and make connections between ideas

​Structural Analysis – Breaking down words into basic parts to determine meaning

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Summarizing - A synthesis of the important ideas in a text requires students to determine what is important in what they read, and condense the information

 

Syllabication - Breaking whole words into smaller parts, with each part containing one vowel sound

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Synonym - Two separate words with a similar meaning (close/shut)

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Utilizing Nursery Rhymes - Helps students pinpoint rhyming patterns



Vowel Digraphs - 2+ vowels adjacent to each other where the first is usually long and the second is usually short (ex. oa)

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Vowel Dipthongs - Sounds that consist of a blend of two separate vowel sounds (ex. oy)

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Vowels - A, E, I, O, and U, with each having a short and long sound

 

Word Knowledge Checklist – A checklist of vocabulary words from a text where students can mark how familiar with the word and its meaning
 

Word ladders - A game in which students add, delete, or replace letters in words to create new words that are prompted by clues and the final word is usually related to the first word
 

Word walls - A way to integrate literacy into the classroom environment and make text take meaning