| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Alphabetic principle | The idea that letters represent sound and that printed letters can be turned into speech (and vice versa). |
| Phonemic awareness | The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds--phonemes--in spoken words. |
| Orthography | The set of rules of how to write correctly with the proper letters and spelling. |
| Genre | A style of expressing yourself in writing |
| Syntax | The grammatical arrangement of words in sentences |
| Semantics | In the study of language, semantics is concerned with the meaning of words, expressions and sentences, often in relation to reference and truth |
| Morphology | The study of meaningful units of language and how they are combined to form words. |
| Suffix | an affix occurring at the end of a word, base, or phrase |
| Digraph | A pair of vowels or consonants that stands for a sound unlike the sound associated with either letter making up the pair. The letters au in auto are a digraph. The letters th in bath are also a digraph. |
| Blend | A synthesis of speech sounds. The two sounds recorded by fr in free are a blend. |
| Diphthong | A close blend of two vowel sounds. The letters in oi in oil record a diphthong. The blend is so close the diphthongs are treated in phonics instruction as if the reference is to a single sound. Oil, therefore, is said to be composed of two sounds. |
| Grapheme | A linguistic term for letter. |
| Pragmatics | The purpose spoken language serves. |
| Metalanguage | A language used to describe another language. |
| Metacognition | An awareness of one's own thinking processes and how they work. The process of consciously thinking about one's learning or reading while actually being engaged in learning or reading. |
| Code-switching | refers to alternating between one or more languages or dialects. It also occurs within a particular language. We use different forms of expression depending on the person we are speaking to and where we are speaking to that person. There are different degrees of formality and informality. |
| Psycholinguistics | The study of psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences. |
| Rhyming | words that have the same ending sound (cat, bat, sat) |
| Consonant blends | Two or more consecutive consonants which retain their individual sounds (e.g. /bl/in block; /str/in string) |
| Consonant digraphs | Two consecutive consonants that represent one phoneme or sound. (e.g. /ch/, /sh/, /wh/, /ph/, /th/) |
| Rime | All the sounds of a syllable from the vowel to the end of the syllable. For example, in "street" "eet" is the rime. |
| Idiom | A phrase or expression that differs from the literal meaning of the words; a regional or individual expression with a unique meaning. (e.g. its raining cats and dogs ) |
| Cognates | Words that are related to each other by virtue of being derived from a common origin (e.g., decisive and decision) |
| Context clues | Using words or sentences around an unfamiliar word to help clarify its meaning |
| Elkonin boxes | A framework used during phonemic awareness instruction. Sometimes referred to as sound boxes. When working with words, the teacher can draw one box for each sound in the word. |
| Homograph | ords that are spelled the same but have different origins and meanings. They may or may not be pronounced the same. (can as in metal can or can as in I can do it.) |
| Homonym | Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. ( e.g. cents/sense knight/night) |
| Schwa | Unstressed, deemphasized sound that closely resembles the short u sound, it is written as an upside down e. Ex.) sounds like the a in about |
| Root | a bound morpheme, cannot stand alone but is used to form a family of words |
| Segmenting | Separating the individual phonemes or sounds of word into discrete units Ex.) cat = /c/ /a/ /t/ |
| Syllable | A vowel sound that is usually paired with one or more consonants Ex.) pa and per are the two syllables in paper |
| Morpheme | The smallest meaningful unit of language Ex.) cats, the s is the morpheme because it denotes more than one cat |
| Phoneme | A linguistic term for speech sound. Ex.) the initial phoneme in Pat is /p/ |
| Prefix | A morpheme that comes before a root word that changes the meaning of the word Ex.) re in the word reprint |
Combine with other sets
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace