Vocabulary

Academic Language - the oral, written, and visual language used in school for instruction, in textbooks, and on high-stakes achievement tests.

Achievement Gap - a consistent disparity in academic performance between groups of students usually based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Alphabetic Principle - the assumption underlying alphabetic language systems that each sound has a corresponding graphic representation.

Authentic Assessment - classroom evaluation in which students create real- world projects to demonstrate their learning. The focus is on application.

Basal Readers - reading textbooks that are leveled according to grade.

Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) - the language skills that English learners acquire for everyday social situations.

Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) - the formal language skills that English learners acquire for academic settings.

Common Core State Standards - nationwide standards for K-12 in English Language Arts and mathematics that indicate what is expected for students at each grade level to learn and be able to do.

Consonant Digraph - two adjacent consonants that represent a sound not represented by either consonant alone.

Contextualized Language - the ability to engage in face-to-face conversations about everyday tangible experiences; listeners can build ideas by using the contexts around words.

Cueing Systems - the phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information that students rely on as they read.

Differentiation - changes to the content, process, product, and learning environment teachers make to best fit each individual student's needs.

Dipthong - a sound produced when the tongue glides from one sound to another; it is represented by two vowels.

Dramatic Play - an advanced form of play in which children take on roles and act out make-believe stories and situations.

Early Literacy - a broad term that refers to the reading and writing behaviors that children engage in from birth to age five.

Echolalia - word-like sounds

Elkonin Boxes - a procedure for segmenting sounds in a word that involves drawing a box to represent each sound.

Emergent Literacy - a view of literacy development suggesting that children learn literacy by constructing, testing, and refining to their own hypotheses about print. Children's skills in reading and writing develop at the same time and are interrelated rather than sequential.

Equilibration - Piaget's process of learning. Students move from a state of equilibrium to a state of disequilibrium as they experience cognitive conflict through new experiences. Assimilation and accommodation are used to reach a more sophisticated equilibrium.

Expressive Language - communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols.

Fast-Mapping - the ability to relate new words to preexisting internalized concepts, then to remember and use them after only one exposure.

Grapheme - a written representation of a sound using one or more letters.

High-Frequency Word - a familiar word that readers are encouraged to recognize on the spot.

Holophrastic Word - one word that carries the semantic burden for a whole sentence or phrase.

Invented Spelling - the child begins to write using understanding of sound- symbol relationships (phonics).

Lexile Scores - a method of estimating the difficulty level of a text.

Literature Circle - an approach to reading instruction in which children meet in small groups to read and respond to a book.

Literacy-Rich Classroom Environment - play centers that are enhanced with appropriate theme-related literacy materials.

Mean Length of Utterance - a measure of linguistic productivity in children.

Mechanics - conventions of writing, including spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Meta-Analysis - a rigorous method that systematically combines study data from several selected studies to develop a single conclusion for research. This is often used in medical and educational research.

Metacommunication - when the children stop the ongoing dramatic play script and discuss the plot or character actions.

Minilesson - explicit instruction about literacy procedures, concepts, strategies, and skills that is taught to small groups or the whole class.

Morpheme - the smallest unit of meaning in language.

Nonphonetic Letter Strings - the child refines writing to specific symbols seen in his or her environment.

Ongoing Assessment - an assessment that relies on the regular collection of children's work to illustrate children's knowledge and understanding.

Onset - the part of a syllable (or one-syllable word) that comes before the vowel.

Orthography - the spelling system.

Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound in a language.

Phonics - the relationship between sounds and letters in written language.

Phonological Awareness - awareness of the sound structure of oral language.

Phonology - the sound system of a language.

Pragmatics - the social use of a language system.

Print Awareness - a child's understanding of the nature and uses of print. A child's print awareness is closely associated with his or her word awareness or the ability to recognize words as distinct elements of oral and written communication.

Prosody - the stress and intonation patterns of a language.

Quantitative Studies - refers to the systematic empirical investigation of social phenomena via statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques.

Read-Aloud - sometimes referred to as "lap-reading", a story read between a parent/caregiver and child.

Receptive Language - the understanding of language input. This includes the understanding of both words and gestures. Receptive language goes beyond vocabulary skills to the ability to interpret the speaker's intent.

Rime - the part of the syllable (or one-syllable word) that begins with the vowel.

Scaffolding - adult support of child learning that is gradually decreased as the child becomes more independent.

Schema - a mental structure in memory including abstract representations of events, objects, and relationships in the world.

Self-Efficacy - children's belief in their capability to succeed and read their goals; children who have self-efficacy are more likely to be higher achieving readers and writers.

Semantics - the meaning system of a language.

Shared Reading - the teacher reads a book aloud as a group of children follow along in the text.

Social Register - a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

Syntax - rules for arranging words into sentences.

Telegraphic Speech - two and three word sentences that contain only the most necessary of words to convey meaning.

Think-Aloud - a technique or strategy in which the teacher verbalizes his or her thoughts aloud while engaging in a task.

Vocables - patterns of speech that exhibit conversation-like tones and behaviors, such as turn-taking, eye-contact, and recognizable gestures.

Writing Process - the process in which children use pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing to develop and refine a composition.

Written Language Register - like social register in verbal communication, written language also has a range of styles but generally is more formal than verbal conversation.

Zone of Proximal Development - the distance between a child's current level of development and the level at which the child can function with adult assistance.

References:

Tompkins, G. E. (2018). Language arts: patterns of practice. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Tompkins, G. E., & Rodgers, E. (2019). Literacy in the early grades: a successful start for preK-4 readers and writers. Boston: Pearson.

Vukelich, C. (2018). Helping young children learn language and literacy: birth through

kindergarten. Boston: Pearson.