Language and Linguistics Flashcards
5 Finger Rule
A method to help students determine if this is a book they would like to read.
How it works: Open book to middle section and hold up a finger for each unknown word on a page. After completing the page, see how many fingers are held up:
1–may be too easy
2 or 3 fingers -just right
4 fingers –challenging
5 fingers– too difficult so save for later
Adjective
A word or words that describe a noun.
Adjectives usually enhance the meaning of the noun.
Adverb
A word that alters, transforms, or changes a verb.
Affix
A word part added to the front of a word which is a prefix, or a word part added to the end of a word which is a suffix.
Alphabetical Principle
Words are composed of letters that represent sounds and that letters and sounds carry meaning.
It also includes the skill to know that print is read from left to right and from top to bottom. It is considered phonics instruction.
Automaticity
Effortless reading of words that usually does not include reading with expression (prosody).
When students continue reading and re-reading text, this helps with their skills in recognizing words; it becomes more automatic.
Book Orientation
Introduction of a book to students through discussion about items such as the front and back covers, title page, the story itself, and unusual names and/or new words, etc.
Closed Syllable
A closed syllable ends in a consonant. This is the most common spelling unit in English and accounts for 505 out of all the total syllables in text.
Example:
Help. Hot. Dog.
Complex Sentence
A complex sentence has an independent clause and a dependent clause.
An independent clause can be a stand-alone sentence, but a dependent clause lacks an element to make it an independent clause.
Example:
While I waited for lunch, I realized that I had left my car keys at home.
Compound Sentence
A compound sentence has two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction (and, for, but, etc.)
Example:
I want to eat at an Italian restaurant, but you want to eat at a Greek restaurant.
Compound-Complex Sentence
A compound-complex sentence is made up of two independent clause and at least one dependent clause.
Example:
The bird was sitting in its nest and it was happily singing, but then it fell out.
“But then it fell out” is a dependent clause. “The bird was sitting in its nest” and “it was happily singing” are both independent clauses.
Concepts of Print
The understanding of how print works in books. Includes knowing the front and back covers of books, how a book opens, and that print is written and read from left to right, top to bottom.
When reading to young children, it often helps to point to words as they are being read in order in order to enhance this concept.
Conjunction
A part of speech which is used to join words, phrases, or clauses in a sentence.
Conventional Spelling
When children know and use most basic spelling rules and spell most words correctly. They can often recognize misspelled words, which is a tremendous help in editing either their own or other’s writing drafts.
Conventional Stage
4th stage of reading
Ages 6-7
Students in this stage:
Demonstrates more control over many aspects of the writing process
Can adjust writing for different purposes such as for information, biographies, and narratives
Criterion-Referenced Assessment
A test based on certain pre-determined learning standards, goals, or criteria. The purpose is to determine if students have actually acquired these standards.
Example:
John is not successful in the learning standards for the learning standards for the writing process.
Criterion-Referenced State Tests
Tests in which a standard has been set for the test taker to achieve in order to pass the test
Critical Reader
A student who applies background knowledge of the text and becomes part of the writer’s audience. It involves analyzing and evaluating the text rather than taking every word as factual.
Consonant+L-E Syllable
A consonant+l-e syllable occurs at the end of a word. If the consonant+l-e syllable is found next to an open syllable, then the vowel in the open syllable stays long. If the consonant+l-e is next to a closed syllable, the vowel in the closed syllable stays short.
Example:
bugle, candle, bubble, circle, and trample.
Curriculum-Based Reading Assessments
The basis of these texts is the curriculum that is being taught.
Declarative Sentence
A declarative sentence simply makes a statement or expresses an opinion; a declarative sentence makes a declaration.
Descriptive Text
Writing used to create detailed descriptions of people, places, and things.
Diagraph
A combination of two letters that represent a single and distinct speech sound.
Examples of common vowel digraphs: ea as in teach; ei as in eight; ow as in owl. Examples of common consonant digraphs: ph as in phone; sh as in shoe; th as in think.
Dipthong
A particular sound that is formed by combining two vowels together.
Examples include the oy in toy; ow in owl; oi as in foil. Because of the way the vowels are combined, a diphthong is sometimes called a gliding vowel.
Early/Developing Stage
This stage (sometimes called the Pre-Reading Stage) of reading occurs typically in grades K-1
Students can :
- Understand basic reading strategies including directionality
- Match words
- Locating known words
- Rely less on pictures
- Begin to phonetic clues to sound out words
Emergent Stage
2nd stage of reading
Sometimes called: Experimental Stage
Ages 4-5
Students in this stage:
Begins to understand/demonstrate relationship between written and spoken words. Knows that what is said (speech) can be written.
Exit Slips
An informal type of assessment that requires students to write a response to a teacher prompt or question on a card or slip of paper at the end of class.
Some examples include:
- What is one thing that you learned today?
- What area do you think we need to discuss more thoroughly?
Expository Text
Factual material that describes and discusses something or tries to persuade.
Examples are biographies, magazines, and newspapers.
Fluency Development
Reading fluency is the ability to read easily and with understanding and expression (prosody).
When students acquire the ability to read fluently, they are not struggling to sound out words and can better concentrate on the meaning of what they are reading.
Fluent Stage
At this stage, students can quickly recognize many words and apply phonics and word analysis skills to analyze unfamiliar words.
Because of these skills, fluent readers can read more easily and with accuracy and expression
Formative Assessment
Tests and/or methods used before and during the teaching of specific learning standards.
Formative assessments are typically not graded.
Genres
Categories or groups of literary compositions such as fiction which might include: poetry, fables, fairy tales, short stories, and novels; non-fiction which might include biographies, history, science, or geography.
Grammar Conventions
Typically refers to punctuation, capitalization, paragraph, development, and spelling.
Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence
A grapheme is a letter or group of letters that represents on sound.
Phonemes are the actual sounds produced by the letters.
The relationship between these written letters and how they sound is the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, sometimes called the letter sound correspondence.
Graphophonemic Knowledge
These skills deal with how letters and sounds are related to written letters and words.
It includes the ability to
- Match upper and lower case letters
- Recognize alphabetic order
- Name letters
- Recognize the letters’ sounds
Guided Reading Practice
The teacher introduces what is to be read and then guides and supports the students while prompting them to apply reading strategies.
The goal is to help the students become independent readers.
High-Frequency Words
The words most commonly used in books according to grade level.
The goal is to ensure that students know all these words by the end of that particular grade.
Hyperbole
Purposefully using exaggeration for either emphasis or humor.
Example:
I am so hungry I could eat the refrigerator.
Imperative Sentence
An imperative sentence gives a command or makes a request
Independent Reading
This is when students read a text with little or no support from adults.
Important Components:
- The length of time vary based on the level of the students’ reading abilities
- To provide a wide range of texts, based on reading levels along with varying interests and genres
Independent Reading Level
The level at which a student can read with ease and with excellent comprehension.
It is typically accepted that students need to read with 90–95% accuracy to be at this level.
Informal Reading Inventory
(IRI)
This form of assessment is individually administered and used to determine a student’s instructional reading needs.
The IRI assesses needs in the areas of:
- Word recognition
- Word meaning
- Reading strategies
- Reading fluency
- Comprehension
Interjection
An interjection is a part of speech that expresses emotions, such as excitement, joy, or surprise.
Interrogative Sentence
An interrogative sentence asks a question.
An interrogative sentence usually begins with one of these words:
Who, what, when, where, why, how, or do and ends with a question mark.
Instructional Reading Level That Is Challenging But Manageable
A measure of reading where a reader (any student in grades 1-8) has difficulty with one in ten words.
Exclamatory Sentence
An exclamatory sentence expresses great emotion such as excitement, surprise, happiness or anger and ends with an exclamation point.
KWL Chart
A chart that has three categories:
- What one knows
- What one wants to know
- What one has learned
The first two sections are filled in at the beginning of a new learning project/reading experience, and the last section is filled in after the topic has been taught.
Language-Rich Environment
Classrooms that are considered language-rich promote literacy development through a number of common attributes including:
- Daily reading aloud to student
- An abundance of available books
- Word walls filled with new vocabulary
- Labels attached to many everyday items
- Inspirational quotes posted throughout
Letter Knowledge
This knowledge enables students to recognize all the letters of the alphabet, both uppercase and lowercase.
It is the understanding that the purpose of letters is to produce meaning in words.
Letter-Sound Correspondence
This refers to the specific sound(s) of letters of the alphabet or letter combinations.
Literacy Acquisition
Acquiring the ability to understand, respond to, and use the written language that is typically required by communities and our society.
Various educators see literacy acquisition as a three-step process for students:
- Learning the conventions of written language and the skills to read and write
- Making meaning from what they read
- Thinking beyond the literal translations of what they read
Literacy Development
The process of the growth of students’ reading, writing, and oral language skills.
Literary Analysis
A higher level of critical thinking which comes after students are able to understand and describe the text which they are reading.
Miscue Analysis
Determining the kinds of reading strategies a reader uses during the process of reading from a text.
A miscue is an incorrect guess, but it often gives the teacher clues to what strategy the reader is using and how difficult the material is for that student. The student may be using such strategies as beginning sounds, context clues, or picture clues.
Morphemic Analysis
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word.
Morphemic analysis is a strategy used to determine the meaning of a word by examining specific parts of the word: prefixes, suffixes, and roots.
Narrative Text
Writing that tells a story and is used to entertain, to gain, and to hold a reader’s interest.
Narratives tell a story, sometimes to entertain or sometimes to convey an important lesson or concept.
Norm-Referenced Assessment
A test that measures a student’s success or non-success compared to other students, of the same age or grade level, who have already taken the test.
Noun
The name of a person, place, event, idea, or thing.
Onomatopoeia
The use of words that imitate the sound associated with the common sound of the object or action it is describing.
Example: Water plops -> splish-splash
Onset Rimes
The ability to hear and understand that the beginning sound in a word is the onset, and the remaining sound is the rime.
In the word cat, the onset is /c/ and the rime is /at/. In the word fit, the onset is /f/ and the rime is /it/.
Open Syllable
An open syllable ends in a vowel.
The vowel has a long vowel sound.
Example:
“va” in vacant: va/cant
“a” in agent: a/gent
“bru” in brutal: bru/tal
Orthographic
The conventional/established spelling in a language.
Peer Assessment
Evaluation of a student’s work by one or more other students in the same grade and working on the same topic.
Performance-Based Assessment
A kind of assessment that requires students to show mastery of specific skills by demonstrating, producing, or performing something.
Personification
Giving human qualities to something that is inanimate.
Persuasive Text
Writing that seeks to evaluate and present a subjective argument to explain a situation or answer a problem.
Phonemic Spelling
When students spell the way they hear the word pronounced.
Example:
come – “kum”
made – “mad”
Phonological Awareness
The understanding and ability to hear individual sounds in words, syllables, and in the spoken language apart from print.
Pre-Communicative Spelling
When students use scribble shapes and sometimes letter-like shapes for spelling words but are unable to make the forms.
Pre-Conventional Stage
1st stage of reading
Sometimes called: Awareness/Exploration Stage
Ages 2-5
Students in this stage:
Aware that drawings and print have specific meanings and may try to “read” what they draw
Pre-Phonemic Spelling
When children have some letter awareness. They may spell a lengthy word with a few letters
Example:
play – “pa”
talk – “tk”
Prefix
A letter or set of letters that can be added to the beginning of a root word and changes its meaning.
Preposition
A part of speech that relates various parts of a sentence using direction, location, or time.
Some common prepositions include above, on, over, toward, down, inside, after, and before.
Examples: “The girl is inside the car” and “She will give her speech after John finishes his.”
Print Awareness
The understanding of the relationship between written language and oral language.
Print-Rich Learning Environment
An environment at school or home in which students have constant exposure and interaction with signs, labels, word displays, charts, poems, books, food labels, resources for writing, and computers.
Proficient Writing
5th and last stage of reading
Ages 7-9
Students in this stage:
Understands and is able to write for various purposes and audiences. Expresses correct usage of most spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.
Prosody
Refers to the way a student orally reads words and sentences; it includes clarity, emphasis, tempo, and intonation.
Prosody is one of the major components of reading fluency and is a link between word recognition and comprehension.
Qualitative Measure
Information that is not in numerical form. Qualitative measures require informed judgments by the teacher.
Quantitative Measure
Information that is in numerical form, such as scores on an achievement test. Quantitative measures are ones that can be analyzed statistically.
R-Controlled Syllable
An r-controlled syllable that contains a vowel followed by the letter r.
The “r” controls the vowel and changes the way the vowel is pronounced.
Example:
car, guitar, mother, manor
Reading Comprehension
Processes through which students derive & construct meaning from the printed page. This kind of reading is opposed to word-calling which is just naming words but not understanding how meaning is derived from the words in sentences and paragraphs.
Reading Fluency
The ability to read easily and with understanding and expression (prosody). It involves not only the rate of reading but accuracy and inflection.
Reading Level
Independent reading level is the highest level at which a reader has adequate background knowledge for the topic and can access the text very quickly and with few errors.
A student at this level has difficulty with no more than one word out of twenty words.
Rubric
A scoring guide based on several criteria rather than a single numerical score
Running Records
An on-going method to assess students’ reading through listening to them read while checking on their accuracy, error rate, and self-correction rate.
Scaffold
Scaffolding refers to building on simpler skills to develop more difficult ones.
Schema Development
Determining a structure of background knowledge that a reader has about what is being read or written.
Teachers often have to develop a schema before reading new information.
Self-Assessment
Evaluation of one’s own work, typically based on pre-determined standards, often from a rubric.
Semiphonetic Spelling
At this stage of spelling development, students may not have directionality–from left to right and top to bottom, but they are able to use letters to represent sounds. They may omit some important letters in words and spell with only a few letters.
Simile
A figure of speech that compares two different things, and that contains “like” or “as.”
Example:
She turned as white as a sheet
Simple Sentence
A simple sentence has the basic elements to make a sentence: a subject, verb, and a complete thought.
Example:
Jesus wept.
Bill drove.
Story Elements
Setting, characters, plot, themes, sequence, problem, and solution.
Suffix
A letter or set of letters that can be added to the ending of a root word and changes its meaning.
Summative Assessment
Tests that are given at certain points and the conclusion of an instructional period, unit, or project. They are used to determine if students have actually learned what has been taught. They are typically used as part of a student’s academic grade.
Syllable
A syllable is any one of the parts into which a word is naturally divided when it is pronounced. It is an unbroken sound that makes up words.
Tier 1 Vocabulary
Basic words that commonly appear in everyday spoken language.
They usually do not require explicit instruction and do not have multiple meanings.
Tier 2 Vocabulary
Words that are used frequently in texts across several content areas. They require specific instruction within the content areas.
Tier 3 Vocabulary
Words that are infrequently used except in specific content areas. They are an integral part of content learning and must be specifically taught.
Examples:
Words in the areas of biology, mathematics, and medicine.
Transitional Spelling
When students use some conventional spelling but still miss spell many irregular words.
Transitional Stage
3rd stage of reading
Sometimes called: Early Stage
Ages 5-6
Students in this stage:
Writes a single letter (often the beginning consonant of the word) to represent an entire word or syllable; begins to understand and use basic punctuation
Verb
A part of speech that describes or indicates an action and is needed to make a complete sentence. Verbs are “doing” words and can show physical or mental action, or a state of being.
Vocabulary Development
Refers to students’ ability to effectively know and use words in their listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Vocabulary Development
The vowel-consonant-e syllable has a silent “e” and makes the vowel before it long; this syllable is usually found at the end of a word.
Example:
name, mice, cake
Vowel Team Syllable
A vowel team syllable has two vowels next to each other that combine to form a new sound.
Example:
The “ou” in south; the “au” in taught; and the “oa” in boat.
Writing Process
The steps that students go through to compose finished text:
- Planning – Deciding on the central idea/topic of the writing.
- Drafting – Bringing together similar ideas and organizing them into paragraphs.
- Revising – Reviewing the draft and making necessary corrections for sentence usage, organization, coherence, and audience.
- Editing – Reviewing the draft a second time, but this time for corrections in grammar, mechanics, and spelling.
- Publishing – Writing the final product to ensure its neatness and understanding.
Word Recognition
This term typically refers to students’ ability to recognize written words correctly and with little effort. Word recognition skills become more important as students learn to read more fluently.
