Elementary Language Arts
Glossary w/The Literacy Dictionary
Affix: A bound (nonword) morpheme that changes the meaning or function of a root or stem to which it is attached, as the prefix ad- and the suffix –ing in adjoining.
Antonyms: A word opposite in meaning to another word.
Appropriate rate: The average expected number of words read in one minute for each grade level- (WPM) or average expected correct number of words read in one minute for each grade level (WCPM).
Automaticity: Fluent processing of information that requires little effort or attention, as sight-word recognition.
Blending: 1. To combine the sounds represented by letters to pronounce a word; sound out. 2. The joining of sounds represented by two or more letters with minimal change in those sounds, as / gr / in grow, / spl / in splash; consonant cluster. Cp. Digraph (def. 1); cluster (def. 2) 3. A word made by combining elements of other words, as in combining / br / in breakfast with / unch in lunch to make brunch.
Book conventions: Cover, title page, dedication page, copyright information, etc.
Chucking phrases: In short-term memory, the process or result of grouping or reorganizing smaller units into larger, more meaningful ones.
Closed Syllables: A syllable ending with one or more consonants, as in mat, hand; blocked syllable; checked syllable.
Complex compound words: A compound word containing base words with meaning not related to the base word. Butterfly for example is not made of butter but can fly.
Comprehension monitoring: In the act of reading, the noting of one’s successes and failures in developing or attaining meaning, usually with reference to an emerging conception of the meaning of the text as a whole, and adjusting one’s reading processes accordingly.
Compound word: A combination of two or more words that function as a single unit of meaning; compound. Note: Compound words are written as a single word (booklist), hyphenated words (books-on-demand), or separately (book report).
Concepts of print: The understanding of the elements of a book (print tells story, cover, title, author, beginning and ending, left to right and top to bottom sequence), sentences (meaning of a sentence, beginning and ending, role of capital letters and punctuation), words, and letters. Concepts of print are also known as print awareness.
Consonant Blends: Two or more consonants that appear together in a word, each consonant retaining its own sound
Context clues: Information from the immediate textual setting that helps identify a word or word group, as by words, phrases, sentences, illustrations, syntax, typography, etc.
Contractions: The shortening of a written or spoken expression by the omission of one or more letters or sounds, as can’t for cannot.
Creating sensory images: Visualization, auditory stimulus, tactile awareness
Decodable text: text in which all or most of the words are decodable based on sound-spelling relationships previously taught.
Decode: To analyze spoken or graphic symbols of a familiar language to ascertain their intended meaning. Note: To learn to read, one must learn the conventional code in which something is written in order to decode the written message. In reading practice, the term is used primarily to refer to word identification rather than to identification of higher units of meaning.
Derivational suffixes: A suffix added to a stem to form another word, as -ness in likeness. Note: A derivational suffix changes the word to which it is added into another part of speech, as -ness forms nouns from adjectives.
Digraph: 1. Two letters that represent one speech sound, as ch for /ch/ in chin or ea for /e/ in bread. 2. A grapheme resulting from the fusion of two letters into one, as oe, AE; ligature.
Diphthongs: A vowel sound produced when the tongue moves or glides from one vowel sound toward another vowel or semivowel sound in the same syllable, as /ī/ in buy and the vowel sounds in bee, bay, boo, boy, and bough. Note: In the Thai language, the change of vowel sound can be extended to three vowels.
Environmental print: Print and other graphic symbols, in addition to books, that are found in the physical environment, as street signs, billboards, television commercials, building signs, etc. Note: Environmental print affords opportunities for learners in early phases of emerging literacy to discover and explore the nature and functions of graphic symbols as conveyors of meaning, even when they are not able to read in a formal sense.
Expression: 1. The act or result of setting forth something in words; utterance; writing. 2. A particular manner of wording, as I don’t believe it – you lie. 3. Modulation and pacing in speech to convey meaning. 4. The quality of feeling shown, as read aloud with forceful expression. 5. An act representative of an organism, as Thinking is an expression of the higher mental process. 6. A symbolic representation, as the mathematical expression x = y.
Final Stable Syllables: When le appears at the end of a word and is preceded by a consonant, the consonant + the le form the final syllable.
Fluency: 1. The clear, easy, written or spoken expression of ideas. 2. Freedom from word-identification problems that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading; automaticity. 3. The ability to produce words or larger language units in a limited time interval. Note: This type of fluency is often tested in a comprehensive reading diagnosis. 4. The ability to execute motor movements smoothly, easily, and readily.
Guided Reading: Reading instruction in which the teacher provides the structure and purpose fro reading and for responding to the material read. Note: Most basal reading programs have guided reading lessons. (See also directed reading activity).
High Frequency/Irregular words: A word that appears many more times than most other words in spoken or written language. Note: Basic words lists generally provide words ranked in order of their frequency of occurrence as calculated from a sample of written or spoken text suitable for the level of intended use.
Homophones: 1. A word with different origin and meaning but the same pronunciation as another word, whether or not spelled alike, as hare and hair, or scale (of a fish) and scale (a ladder). 2. In popular usage, two or more different graphemes that represent the same sound, as /k/ spelled c in candy, k in king, ch in school.
Hyphenated Compound Words: Compound words that contain a hyphen.
Inflectional Endings: A suffix added to a base word to show tense, plurality, possession, or comparison
Intonation: The distinctive patterns of pitch that contribute to the meanings of spoken phrases and sentences, as between commands and questions such as “Go now!” and “Go now?” intonation pattern.
Letterforms: The shapes of the letters of the alphabet with regard to their designs or historical development
Manipulating: Adding, exchanging, deleting, or transposing phonemes (sounds) to form new words
Medial: Referring to a sound or letter that neither begins nor ends a syllable or word, as /t/ /a/ /m/ in stamp or /a/ in cat.
Multi-syllabic: containing more than one syllable
Onsets: That part of a syllable preceding the syllable peak or nucleus; normally, the consonants preceding the vowel of a syllable, as str in strip.
Open Syllables: A syllable ending in a vowel sound rather than a consonant sound, as /bā/ and /bē/ in baby.
Pacing: 1. Using a pacer to control rate of reading in connected discourse either mechanically or manually, as by running one’s fingers below and across each line of text. 2. The rate at which material to be learned or read is presented by a teaching machine or through computer-assisted instruction. 3. Setting one’s own pace in reading or learning. Note: By using a pacing pattern appropriate for the reading task, the reader can be helped to develop a more flexible reading rate. 4. Adjusting the rate at which instruction and instructional materials are provided in order to accommodate differences in learning behavior.
Phonemes: A minimal sound unit of speech that, when contrasted with another phoneme, affects the meaning of words in a language, as /b/ in book contrasts with /t/ in took, /k/ in cook, /h/ in hook. Note: The phoneme is an abstract concept manifested in actual speech as a phonetic variant, as the allophones of the phoneme /t/ in top, stop, pot.
Phonemic Awareness: Is the awareness of the sounds (phonemes) that make up spoken words.
Phonograms: 1. A graphic character or symbol that can represent a phonetic sound, phoneme, or word. 2. In word recognition, a graphic sequence comprised of a vowel grapheme and an ending consonant grapheme, as –ed in red, bed, fed or –ake in bake, cake, lake.
Phonological Awareness: Awareness of the constituent sounds of words in learning to read and spell. Note: The constituents of words can be distinguished in three ways: a. by syllables, as /bŏŏk/. b. by onsets and rimes, as /b/ and /ŏŏk/. c. by phonemes, as /b/ and /ŏŏ/ and /k/.
Phrase boundaries: chunking text that in syntactically appropriate phrases
Predictions: 1.The act of asserting, as the prediction of a proposition. 2. Something so asserted. 3. The relation expressed by a predicate to a subject in a sentence, as that between rang and the telephone in The telephone rang.
Prefix: An affix attached before a base word or root, as re- in reprint.
Read alouds: Reading text aloud to accomplish a particular purpose. Purposes may include: helping students understand a particular piece of literature, activating already acquired knowledge, developing background vocabulary and concepts, modeling real reading, motivating students to read, and building comprehension of text with particularly difficult concepts or words.
Return Sweep: The diagonal eye-movement, or saccade, from the end of one line of print to the start of the next.
r-Controlled Vowel Words: The letter r affects the sound of the vowel that precedes it. Examples include ir, er, and ur as in her, or as in or, and ar as in car.
Rimes: A vowel and any following consonants of a syllable, as /ŏŏk/ in book or brook, /ĭk/ in strike, and /ā/ in play.
Root: The basic part of a word that usually carries the main component of meaning and that cannot be further analyzed with out loss of identity.
Schwa: 1. In English, the midcentral vowel in an unaccented or unstressed syllable: as the first vowel sound in alone. 2. The graphic symbol (Ə) commonly used in phonetic alphabets and pronunciation keys to represent such a vowel.
Segmenting: separating words in sounds
Self-monitoring: In writing, the conscious awareness of the progress of the text, marked by rereading and reflection on features of the text needed to communicate effectively to an audience.
Set a purpose for reading: The reader determines their reason for reading a text self selected or pre-selected by others.
Shared Reading: An early childhood instructional strategy in which the teacher involves a group of young children in the reading of a particular big book in order to help them learn aspects of beginning literacy, as print conventions and the concept of word, and develop reading strategies, as in decoding or the use of prediction.
Simple compound words: a word made up of two smaller words. Often the meaning can be derived from the meaning of the two smaller words that comprise it.
Suffix: An affix attached to the end of a base, root, or stem that changes meaning or grammatical function of the word, as –en added to ox- to form oxen.
Summarizing: A brief statement that contains the essential ideas of a longer passage or selection.
Sustained practice: A sustained period of time during which individuals read on their own.
Syllable: In phonology, a minimal unit of sequential speech sounds comprised of a vowel sound or a vowel-consonant combination, as /a/, /ba/, /ab/, /bab/, etc. Note: In most languages, vowels play a central role in syllable formation since, by definition, a syllable always contains a vowel or vowel-like speech sound. In consonant-vowel-consonant syllable forms, as /bab/, the opening segment is called the onset, the final segment, the coda, and the central or most prominent segment, typically a vowel, the nucleus. The onset and coda are sometimes collectively called syllable margins. In metrical phonology, the nucleus and coda are regarded as a single unit called a rime.
Synonyms: 1. One of two or more words in a language that have highly similar meanings, as sadness, grief, sorrow, etc. 2. A word used in a figurative sense, as the deep for water, a heel for an untrustworthy person, etc.; metonym.
Text features: An important feature of literary and informational text that facilitates understanding for the reader (i.e., title, illustrations, diagrams, labels, bulleted lists, captions, etc.)
Vowel Pair or Digraph: refers to pairs of vowels appearing together in a word. Common long vowel diagraphs are ai, ay, ee, ea, igh, and oa.
Vowel pair syllable: Syllables that contain a vowel pair (diagraph) are not divided. The vowel pair stays together in the syllable.
Vowel-Silent e syllable: A syllable which ends in silent e after one consonant. The vowel before the consonant is regularly long. This type of syllable may occur in monosyllables, in final position in multi-syllables or in medial position before a suffix which begins with a consonant. Rarely, it occurs medially in compound words, e.g., hide, concrete, facecloth.
Word accuracy: Words read correctly in isolation or within continuous text
Word boundaries: Where a word begins and ends. This task demonstrates understanding of the concept of a word. Some teachers encourage children to use cup their hands around words on the board. Others find ways to help children to use spaces as a cue to the word boundaries.