• Cracking the Code of Reading Terms Used in School

     

     

    Automaticity
    Automaticity is a general term that refers to any skilled and complex behavior that can be performed easily with little attention, effort, or conscious awareness. These skills become automatic after extended periods of training. With practice and good instruction, students become automatic at word recognition, that is, retrieving words from memory, and are able to focus attention on constructing meaning from the text, rather than decoding.

     

    Comprehension

    The ability to pull meaning from spoken and written words.

     

    Concepts of Print

    Ideas about how print conveys meaning that children need to have before they can learn to read, such as the left-to-right direction of text, the difference between letters and words, and the parts of a book.

     

    Decodable Texts

    Books for beginning readers that contain words with the same vowel sounds and similar spellings, such as, "The fat cat sat on the mat."

     

    Decode

    The ability to sound out letters and words.

     

    Environmental Print

    Words and symbols encountered outside of books in everyday life, such as product labels, logos, and traffic signs.

     

    Fluency
    Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression and comprehension. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding words, they can focus their attention on what the text means.

     

    Fluent Reader

    A fluent reader reads most words and phrases and is able to use varying strategies to figure out the pronunciation and meaning of unknown words and phrases. A fluent reader is able to question the meaning of what is being read.

     

    Letter Knowledge

    The ability to identify letters of the alphabet.

     

    Letter Recognition

    The ability to name a letter that is displayed or find a letter in a group.

     

    Letter-Sound Correspondence

    The ability to say or write the letter that corresponds to a speech sound.

     

    Phoneme

    The smallest units of sound that may be used to form words. For example, p-ea-k (peak) has three phonemes.

     

    Phonemic Awareness

    The awareness that spoken words are made of sounds, and the ability to identify individual sounds in spoken words.

     

    Phonemic Blending

    Blending individual sounds together to make words, for example c-a-t to "cat."

     

    Phonemic Segmentation

    The opposite of phonemic blending, separating a word into sounds, for example "cat" to

    c-a-t.

     

    Phonics

    The relationship between letters and the sounds they make.

     

    Phonics Instruction

    An approach to reading instruction that focuses on the sounds and spellings of written words.

     

    Phonological Awareness

    The ability to understand the relationships of sounds in spoken words. At a simple level, children can identify rhyming words. At a more complex level, children can identify similarities in sounds and spellings.

     

    Picture Cues

    Story illustrations that are closely matched to the words so that a reader can refer to the picture for help if he or she has difficulty with an unknown word.

     

    Print Awareness

    Awareness of the rules of written language, such as knowing that letters and numbers convey meaning and that words are separated by spaces.

    Reading Strategies

    Approaches a reader uses to help discover the meaning of words and phrases, such as studying illustrations and making predictions.

     

    Sight Word

    A word that a child recognizes and reads without having to sound it out.  These words are often not decodable, for example, said.

     

    Syllable

    The smallest part that a spoken word can be broken that includes a vowel, for example, "watermelon" has four syllables: wa-ter-mel-on.