LITERACY TERMS

academic Language: The language needed by students to do the work in schools. It includes, for example, discipline-specific vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, and applications of rhetorical conventions and devices that are typical for a content area.

affricate: A speech sound with features of both a fricative and a stop; in English, /ch/ and /j/ are affricates. (Additional Resource)

affixation: a process that forms new words from two or more independent words containing more than one root. (Additional Resource)

allophones: slight alterations to the pronunciation of phonemes resulting from phonemes overlapping with one another in spoken word.

alphabet: A system of letters intended to represent the sounds of a language in writing.

alphabetic principle: The concept that letters are used to represent individual phonemes in the spoken word. (Additional Resource)

automaticity: the ability to read quickly and accurately without conscious effort.

B

background knowledge: Preexisting knowledge of facts and ideas necessary to make inferences.

base words: Words that can stand on their own or serve as part of another word, as a free morpheme.

blend: Two or three graphemes, each one representing a phoneme. (e.g. s-c-r); a blend is not one sound but two or three adjacent consonants before or after a vowel in a syllable.

bound morpheme: a word element that cannot stand alone as a word, including both prefixes and suffixes

C

closed syllable: A syllable with a short vowel spelled with a single vowel letter and ending in one or more consonants. (e.g., mat, sit, hen) (Additional Resource)

coarticulation: Occurs when phonemes are spoken together to produce syllables or words, and the features of these phones are affected by the speech sounds that precede or follow them.

cognate: A word in one language that shares a common ancestor and common meaning with a word in another language.

consonant: A phoneme (speech sound) that is not a vowel and that is formed by obstructing the flow of air with the teeth, lips, or tongue. English has 25 consonant phonemes.

consonant blend: Two or three consonant phonemes before or after a vowel in a syllable. `

consonant-le (Cle) syllable: An unaccented final syllable containing a consonant before / followed by a silent e. (Additional Resource Video)

D

decoding: The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences.

derivational suffixes: Grammatical endings that mark or determine the part of speech of the suffixed word. (Additional Resource)

digraph: A two-letter combination that stands for a single phoneme in which neither letter represents its usual sound. (e.g., sh, ck, th, ch)

diphthongs: a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves toward another. (e.g., coin, loud).

double deficit: A combination of phonological and naming-speech deficits.

doublet: A double letter that represents one phoneme. (e.g., ff, ll, ss, zz).

dysgraphia: A breakdown in the communication pathways between the mind's image of a letter and the hand's ability to produce that letter in written form. (Additional Resource)

E

expressive vocabulary: The words one uses in speaking and writing.

embedded phonics: In this approach, children learn vocabulary through explicit instruction or the letter-sound relationships during the reading of connected text, usually when the teacher notices that a child is struggling to read a particular word.

F

foundational writing skills: The skills necessary to transcribe or encode words into written symbols, using phonological, orthographic, morphological, and syntactic aspects of language.

fricative: A consonant sound created by forcing air through a narrow opening in the vocal tract; (e.g., /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /sh/, /zh/, and /th/) (Aditional Resource)

G

glide: A type of speech sound that glides immediately into a vowel; includes /h/, /w/, and /y/. (Video Resource)

grapheme: A letter or letter combination that spells a phoneme; can be one, two, three, or four letters in English. (e.g., e, ei, igh, eight)

H

high-frequency words: Words that occur most often in written English, including articles, common nouns, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary (helping) verbs.

homonym: each of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins. (Additional Resource)

homograph: are words that have the same spelling but different meanings, whether they're pronounced the same or not. (Additional Resource)

homophone: each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, for example, new and knew. (Additional Resource)

I

inflectional suffixes: Grammatical endings that do not change the part of speech of the word to which they are added.

IPA: A system of transcribing the sounds of languages which consists of some Latin and Greek letters and a variety of additional symbols and diacritics. The goal is to represent each recognizable sound in a unique fashion. The IPA system was developed at the end of the last century; the acronym stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. (Additional Resource)

L

lexicon: The name for the mental dictionary in every person's phonological processing system.

liquid: The speech sounds /l/ and /r/ that have vowel-like qualities and no easily definable point of articulation.

low-frequency words: Words that do not occur often in printed text, and which are likely to be found only in text concerning a specific topic.

M

metacognition: The act of monitoring and assessing one's own awareness and thought processes.

morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language; it may be a word or a part of a word; it may be a single sound (e.g., plural /s/), one syllable (e.g., suffix-ful), or multiple syllables (e.g., prefix inter-).

morphology: The study of meaningful units in a language and how the units are combined in word formation.

morphophonemic: Englis orthography is morphophonemic, which means that it is a deep alphabetic writing system organized by both sound-symbol correspondences and morphology.

N

nasal: A type of phoneme that directs resonance through the nose; in English, /n/, /m/, and /ng/ are nasal phonemes.

O

onset-rime: The natural division of a syllable into two parts; the onset comes before the vowel, and the rime includes the vowel and what follows after it.

open syllable: A syllable ending with a long vowel sound that is spelled with a single vowel letter.

orthographic mapping: The mental process used to store words for immediate and effortless retrieval. It requires phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and the mechanism for sight word learning.

orthography: A writing system for representing language.

P

phoneme: A speech sound that combines with others in a language system to make words.

phoneme addition: In this activity, children make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word.

phoneme blending: In this activity, children learn to listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes, and then combine the phonemes to form a word. (/h/ /a/ /t/ is hat)

phoneme deletion: In this activity, children learn to recognize the word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word.

phoneme identity: In this activity, children learn to recognize the same sounds in different words.

phoneme isolation: In this activity, children learn to recognize and identify individual sounds in a word.

phoneme segmentation: In this activity, children break a word into its separate sounds, saying each sounds as they tap out or count it.

phoneme substitution: In this activity, children substitute one phoneme for another to make a new word.

phoneme-grapheme mapping: The matching of phonemes (sounds) in words with graphemes (letters) that represent them.

phonemic awareness: The conscious awareness of the individual speech sounds (consonants and vowels) in spoken syllables and the ability to consciously manipulate those sounds.

phonics: The study of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent; also used as a descriptor for code-based instruction.

phonological awareness: The conscious awareness of all levels of the speech sound system, including word boundaries, stress patterns, syllables, onset-rime units, and phonemes.

phonological lexicon: The brain's storehouse of words previously heard, but not necessarily understood.

phonological working memory: The "online" memory system that remembers speech long enough to extract meaning from it, or that holds onto words during writing; a function of the phonological processing system.

phonology: The rule system within a language by which phonemes can be sequenced, combined, and pronounced to make words.

phrases: Groups of words that cluster together to fill grammatical slots in sentences.

prosody: The rhythms and patterns of sounds in spoken language; expression.

R

rapid automatic naming (RAN): The ability to quickly name a series of printed, repeated numbers, letters, or objects that should be known by rote.

root: A bound morpheme, usually of Latin origin, that cannot stand alone but that is used to form a family of words with related meanings (e.g. spect, vis).

S

schema: A mental model or conceptual framework for a specific topic or idea.

schwa: The empty vowel in an unaccented syllable, such as the last syllable in bacon.

semantic lexicon: The brain's "mental dictionary" of word meanings, including synonyms and related mental concepts.

semantic map: The association of meanings and context for a given word, including structure, origin, images, personal associations, synonyms, antonyms, and historical or cultural connotations.

semantic properties: The features or attributes of a morpheme, word, or sentence that contribute to its meaning.

semantics: The study of word and phrase meanings and relationships.

sight vocabulary: A student's bank of words that are instantly and effortlessly recognized; includes both regularly spelled and irregularly spelled words.

silent letter combinations: A letter combination where one or more letters is silent, but another letter does represent the phoneme.

single deficit: A prominent and specific weakness in either phonological processing or rapid print (naming-speed) processing.

stop: A consonant which is formed by blocking off the airstream completely, (e.g., /p, t, k/). It constants with fricative which does not involve an interruption of the airstream.

suffix: Any element attached to the right- hand side of a stem.

syllable: The unit of pronunciation that is organized around a vowel; it may or may not have a consonant after the vowel.

systematic and explicit phonics instruction: The most effective way to teach phonics. A program is systematic if the plan of instruction includes a carefully selected set of letter-sound relationships that are organized into a logical sequence. Explicit means the programs provide teachers with precise directions for the teaching of these relationships.

T

trigraph: A three-letter combination that represents one phoneme. (e.g., -tch, dge)

V

vocabulary: Knowledge of, and memory for, word meanings.

voiced: spoken with simultaneous vibration of the vocal folds.

voiceless: Spoken without the vocal folds vibrating.

vowel: One of a set of 15 vowel phonemes in English, not including r-controlled combinations or schwa; an open phoneme that is the heart of every spoken syllable.

vowel team: A combination of two, three, or four letters that stand for a vowel.

vowel-consonant-e (VCe): A common pattern for spelling a long vowel sound.

vowel-r combination: A single vowel letter followed by r that stands for a unique vowel sound.

W

word parts: Word parts include affixes (prefixes and suffixes), base words, and word roots.

word roots: word roots are words from other languages that are the origin of many English words.