Environmental Print
Signs, labels, and other print found in the community.
Grand Conversation
A small-group or whole-class discussion about literature.
Interactive Writing
A writing activity in which students and the teacher write a text together, with the students taking turns to do most of the writing themselves.
K-W-L Charts
An activity to generate background knowledge and set purposes for reading an informal text and to bring closure after reading. The letters stand for What I (We) Know, What I (We) Wonder, and What I (We) Learned.
Language Experience Approach (LEA)
A student's dictated composition written by the teacher and used as a text for reading instruction; it is generally used with beginning readers.
Minilessons
Explicit instruction about literacy procedures, concepts, strategies, and skills that are taught to individual students, small groups, or the whole class, depending on students' needs.
Prereading
The first stage of the reading process, in which readers activate background knowledge, set purposes, and make plans for reading.
Shared Reading
The teacher reads a book aloud with a group of children as they follow along in the text, often using a big book.
Word Sort
A word-study activity in which students group words into categories.
Word Wall
An alphabetized chart posted in the classroom listing words students are learning.
Anticipation Guides
Beginning Reading
Book Talk
Explaining books prior to students choosing books for literacy circles.
Choral Reading
Students take turns reading lines of a poem.
Collaborative Book
When students make one, its guided reading because the teacher organizes the activity and supervises students as they work.
Emergent Reading
Fluent Reading
Groups
Interactive Read Aloud
Morning Message
Fill-in-the-Blank Morning Message
Open-Mind Portrait
Prereading Plans
Readers' Theater
Students assume the roles of characters and read lines of a script.
Rubrics
Running Records
Semantic Feature Analysis
Story Boards
Think-Aloud
Teachers share what they're thinking as they read or write and the decisions they make and the strategies they use.
Writing Groups
Aesthetic Reading
Reading for pleasure
Alphabetic Principle
The assumption underlying alphabetical language systems that each sound has a corresponding graphic representation (or letter).
Applying
The fifth stage of the reading process, in which readers go beyond the text to use what they have learned in another literacy experience, often by making a project or reading another book.
Authentic Literacy Activities
Activities and materials related to real-world reading and writing.
Automaticity
Identifying words accurately and quickly.
Background Knowledge
A student's knowledge or previous experiences about a topic.
Basal Readers
Reading textbooks that are leveled according to grade.
Basal Reading Program
A collection of student textbooks, workbooks, teacher's manuals, and other materials and resources for reading instruction used in kindergarten through sixth grade.
Big Books
Enlarged versions of picture books that teachers read with children, usually in the primary grades.
Blend
To combine the sounds represented by letters to produce a word.
Bound Morpheme
A morpheme that is not a word and cannot stand alone (ex. -s, tri-)
Comprehension
The process of constructing meaning using both the author's text and the reader's background knowledge for a specific purpose.
Concepts about Print
Basic understandings about the way print works, including the direction of print, spacing, punctuation, letters, and words.
Cueing Systems
The phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information that students rely on as they read.
Decoding
Using word-identification strategies to pronounce and attach meaning to an unfamiliar word.
Differentiated Instruction
Procedures for assisting students in learning, providing options, challenging students, and matching books to students to maximize their learning.
Drafting
The second stage of the writing process, in which writers pour out ideas in a rough draft.
Editing
The fourth stage of the writing process, in which writers proofread to identify and correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammatical errors.
Echo Reading
The teacher or other reader reads a sentence and a group of students reread or "echo" what was read.
Efferent Reading
Reading for information.
Elkonin Boxes
A strategy for segmenting sounds in a word that involves drawing a box to represent each sound.
Emergent Literacy
Children's early reading and writing development before conventional reading and writing.
Explicit Instruction
Systematic instruction of concepts, strategies, and skills that builds from simple to complex.
Family Literacy
Home-school partnerships to enhance students' literacy development.
Fluency
Reading smoothly, quickly, and with expression.
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word (ex. cycle, book)
Frustration Level
The level of reading material that is too difficult for a student to read successfully.
Grapheme
A written representation of a sound using one or more letters.
Guided Reading
Students work in small groups to read as independently as possible a text selected and introduced by the teacher.
High-Frequency Word
A common English word, usually a word among the 100 or 300 most common words.
Imagery
The use of words and figurative language to create an impression
Independent Reading Level
The level of reading material that a student can read independently with a high rate of comprehension and an accuracy level of 95-100%.
Informal Reading Inventory (IRI)
An individually administered reading test composed of word lists and graded passages that are used to determine students' independent, instructional, and frustration levels and listening capacity levels.
Instructional Reading Level
The level of reading material that a student can read with teacher support and instruction with 90-94% accuracy.
Invented Spelling
Students' attempts to spell words that reflect their developing knowledge about the spelling system.
Literacy
The ability to read and write.
Literature Circle
An instructional approach in which students meet in small groups to read and respond to a book.
Literature Focus Unit
An approach to reading instruction in which the whole class reads and responds to a piece of literature.
Metacognition
Students' awareness of their own thought and learning process.
Miscue Analysis
A strategy for categorizing and analyzing a student's oral reading errors.
Morpheme
The smallest meaningful part of a word; sometimes it is a word (ex. cup, hope) and sometimes it is not a whole word (ex. -ly, -bi).
Narrative
A story.
New Literacies
The ability to use digital and multimodal technologies to communicate and learn effectively.
Phoneme
A sound; it is represented in print with slashes (ex. /s/ and /th/).
Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondence
The relationship between a sound and the letter that represents it.
Phonemic Awareness
The ability to manipulate the sounds in words orally.
Phonics
Predictable relationships between phonemes and graphemes.
Phonics Instruction
Teaching the relationships between letters and sounds and how to use them to read and spell words.
Phonological Awareness
The ability to identify and manipulate phonemes, onsets and rimes, and syllables; it includes phonemic awareness.
Pragmatics
The social use system of language.
Prediction
A strategy in which students predict what will happen in a story and then read to verify their guesses.
Prewriting
The first stage of the writing process, in which writers gather and organize ideas for writing.
Proofreading
Reading a comprehension to identify and correct spelling and other mechanical errors.
Quickwrite
An activity in which students explore a topic through writing.
Readability Formula
A method of estimating the difficulty level of a text.
Reading
The second stage of the reading process, in which readers read the text for the first time using independent read, shared reading, or guided reading, or by listening to it read aloud.
Reading Workshop
An approach in which students read self-selected texts independently.
Responding
The third stage of the reading process, in which readers respond to the text, often though grand conversations and by writing in reading logs.
Revising
The third stage of the writing process, in which writers clarify meaning in their writing.
Scaffolding
The support a teacher provides to students as they read and write.
Semantics
The meaning system of language.
Strategy
A problem-solving behavior that students use in reading and writing, such as predicting, monitoring, visualizing, and summarizing.
Skill
An automatic processing behavior that students use in reading and writing, such as sounding out words, recognizing antonyms, and capitalizing proper nouns.
Struggling Reader or Writer
A student who isn't meeting grade-level expectations in reading or writing.
Text
Words appearing in print.
Word Identification
Strategies that students use to decode words, such as phonic analysis, analogies, syllabic analysis, and morphemic analysis.
Writing Process
The process in which students use prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing to develop and refine a composition.
Writing Workshop
An approach in which students use the writing process to write books and other compositions on self-selected topics.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
The distance between a child's actual developmental level and his or her potential developmental level that can be reached with scaffolding by the teacher or classmates.
Third-grade teacher Gloria Brady plans activities so that her students can learn by collaboration. She encourages her students to expand their understanding by relating new experiences to their background knowledge. This teacher follows the theory of:
Constructivism
To gather data for a research report on figure skating, Emily Hughes read biographies of three Olympic gold medal winners: Peggy Fleming, Katarina Witt, and Kristi Yamaguchi. During this task, Emily took a(n):
Efferent Stance
Piaget described learning as the modification of children's cognitive structures or:
Schemata
Each day fifth-grade teacher Tara Holdsworth meets with small homogeneous groups of children to read a book at their instructional level. This teacher is using an approach known as:
Guided Reading
The primary reason why phonics instruction alone does not constitute a complete reading program is that:
Good readers do more than decode words as they read.
Research suggests that students are usually more motivated and engaged when they participate in:
Authentic Literacy Activities
When planning reading instruction, the most effective teachers usually:
Use a combination of instructional approaches.
Fifth-grade teacher Lucille Hager gives her students challenging assignments. Although the students are usually not able to complete these assignments independently, the students can complete the assignments with appropriate help and guidance from a teacher or parent. These appropriately challenging assignments fall within the students':
Zone of Proximal Development
Fourth-grade teacher Debbie Smith always assesses her students' background knowledge before asking them to read about a topic. While preassessment serves many purposes, the most important reason to use preassessment in this situation is to determine:
Whether the students are familiar with the topic of the text.
Sixth-grade teacher George Harris has selected a book which is appropriate for his students' interest level but too difficult for the students to read independently. Mr. Harris can use this book effectively by:
Reading the text aloud and discussing it with the students.
Research has shown that the most effective way to teach students to use punctuation marks correctly is to:
Discuss the use of punctuation marks during editing conferences.
There are several stages in the writing process and:
As students write, the stages merge and recur.
Reading and writing are:
Parallel Processes
Readers and writers engage in many similar activities. Effective teachers show students that both readers and writers:
Read texts to gather ideas and examine the structure of stories.
The best time to present a minilesson is when students:
Will have immediate opportunities to apply what they are learning.
Because he felt that that some English learners in his classroom may not have the background knowledge necessary to comprehend a specific text, fourth-grade teacher Kevin Tim appropriately assessed the students' background knowledge by using a(n):
K-W-L Chart
A teacher asked a student to read a paragraph. As the student read, the teacher made a series of checkmarks to indicate words read correctly and she used other marks to indicate substitutions, repetitions, and omissions. This teacher conducted a(n):
Running Record
A teacher plans to use a rubric to assess the writing of students who are English learners. For these beginning writers, the first priority is:
Fluency
Of the following, the best way to help students review their progress and set goals would be to:
Conduct individual portfolio review conferences.
Of the following, the most significant benefit of using portfolios is that they enable a student to:
Monitor his own progress.
A sixth-grade class is required to take a high-stakes standardized test at the end of the school year. To prepare the students, their teacher should:
Integrate lessons on test-taking strategies in the existing instructional program.
Running Records are considered an authentic form of assessment because:
Students use their regular reading materials.
Texts used for guided reading sessions should match the student's:
Instructional Levels
High-stakes tests often report students' scores as:
Lexile Scores
When compiling lists for summer recreational reading, teachers should recommend books at the students':
Independent Levels
A teacher gave an Informal Reading Inventory and found that a fourth-grade student's reading level was below grade-level placement. To plan content-area instruction for that student, it would be most helpful for the teacher to also check the student's:
Listening Capacity
Informal reading inventories usually contain:
Graded word lists and passages.
Which of the following is NOT a purpose of the Classroom Reading Inventory: a. to classify students in terms of global reading achievement b. to identify an individual student's reading skills and abilities c. to provide teachers with specific information that will enable them to make instructional decisions d. to identify a student's reading level
a. to classify students in terms of global reading achievement
The CRI identifies three reading levels for individual students. They are: a. independent, instructional, and frustration b. independent, guided, frustration c. individual, instructional, and frustration d. word recognition, fluency, and comprehension
a. independent, instructional, and frustration
True or False: Students' background knowledge of the topic of Graded Passages should be taken into account when administering the CRI.
True
True or False: The CRI includes three parts. They are Graded Word Lists, Graded Paragraphs and Spelling Assessment.
False
Which TWO of the following are purposes of the Graded Word List is: a. to identify specific word recognition errors b. to estimate the approximate starting level for beginning the Graded Paragraphs c. to determine a student's three reading levels d. to test sight word knowledge
a. to identify specific word recognition errors b. to estimate the approximate starting level for beginning the Graded Paragraphs
Part One of the CRI has students read from Graded Word Lists. Students should begin reading the Graded Word lists: a. at their grade level in school b. at the preprimer level c. at the level the teacher estimates to be their independent reading level d. at the level the teacher estimates to be their instructional reading level
b. at the preprimer level
True or False: The CRI is a norm referenced test.
FALSE
Discontinue having students read from the Graded Word Lists: a. At the level the student makes five errors b. At the level the student makes two errors c. At the level the student makes eight errors d. At the level the student makes zero errors
a. At the level the student makes five errors
Which of the following is NOT a purpose of the Graded Paragraphs: a. To estimate the student's independent and instructional reading levels b. To identify significant word recognition errors made during oral reading c. To estimate the extent to which the student comprehends what s/he reads d. To compare students' reading skills and abilities to other students
d. To compare students' reading skills and abilities to other students
Which of the following is NOT a common Word Recognition error recognized by the CRI: a. omissions b. substitutions c. self-corrections d. repetitions
c. self-corrections
Research suggests that children learn alphabet letter names most effectively by:
Having many experiences with meaningful written language.
Most young children's introduction to written language begins:
Before they come to school.
A first-grade teacher placed empty cereal boxes in a literacy play center and encouraged the children to read the logos. Cereal box logos are examples of:
Environmental Print
Of the following, the best way for teachers to model literacy behaviors for emergent readers is to use:
Shared Reading
Six-year-old Kira recognizes most high-frequency words automatically. When she encounters an unfamiliar word, she uses context clues or decoding techniques to identify it. As a reader, Kira is in the:
Fluent Stage?
Children should be fluent readers and writers by:
The end of third grade.
Instruction focuses on the use of phonics to decode and spell words when children are in the:
Beginning stage of literacy development.
When the first-grade teacher read aloud a book that had repetitive sentences, the students joined in the reading by repeating the familiar phrases. In this situation, the teacher was using a type of book known as a(n):
Predictable Book
The first-grade students in Kathy Smyth's class are motivated to spell words conventionally, but they still have trouble spelling some high-frequency words. Of the following, the most effective way to help these students spell the words they need in their writing would be to:
Post high-frequency words on a classroom word wall.
A kindergarten teacher used the language experience approach from the first day of school until the final days of the academic year. She noticed that in the beginning the children dictated quickly as they thought of ideas. As the school year progressed, they began to pace their dictation to the teacher's writing speed. This behavior showed that the children were acquiring:
Concepts about Print
The children in Judy Short's first-grade class can write a few high-frequency words independently but still require teacher guidance to write sentences. Of the following, the technique which would be most appropriate to help children at that developmental level write a text would be:
Interactive Writing
When asked to explain the difference between shared reading and reading aloud, the teacher correctly stated that during shared reading:
Students see the text as the teacher reads.
Phonological System
The sound system of English with approximately 44 sounds and more than 500 ways to spell them.
Terms of the Phonological System
Phoneme, Grapheme, Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics
Syntactic System
The structural system of English that governs how words are combined into sentences.
Terms of the Syntactic System
Syntax, Morpheme, Free Morpheme, Bound Morpheme
Semantic System
The meaning system of English that focuses on vocabulary.
Terms of the Semantic System
Semantics, Synonyms, Antonyms, Homonyms
Pragmatic System
The system of English that varies language according to social and cultural uses.
Terms of the Pragmatic System
Function, Standard English, Nonstandard English
Four Cueing Systems of English:
1. Phonological System (sound) 2. Syntactic System (structural) 3. Semantic System (meaning) 4. Pragmatic System (social/cultural use)
When students read stories __________ rather than _________, they don't develop a love of reading and are less likely to become lifelong readers
efferently/aesthetically
Characteristics of a Community of Learners
Responsibility, Opportunities, Engagement, Demonstration, Risk Taking, Instruction, Response, Choice, Time, Assessment
The characteristics of the balanced approach are embodied in an instructional program that includes these components:
Reading Phonics and other literacy skills Reading and writing strategies Vocabulary Comprehension Literature Content-area study Oral Language Writing Spelling
Continuum of Reading Instruction
Modeled, Shared, Interactive, Guided, Indepedent
Uses of Modeled Reading and Writing
-Demonstrate fluent reading and writing -Explain how to use reading and writing strategies, such as predicting, using context clues, and revising. -Teach the procedure for a literacy activity. -Show how reading and writing conventions and other skills work.
Uses of Shared Reading and Writing
-Involve students in literacy activities they can't do independently. -Create opportunities for students to experience success in reading and writing. -Provide practice before students read and write independently.
Uses of Interactive Reading and Writing
-Practice reading and writing high-frequency words. -Apply phonics and spelling skills. -Read and write texts that students can't do independently. -Have students share their literacy expertise with classmates.
Uses of Guided Reading and Writing
-Support students' reading in appropriate instructional-level materials. -Teach literacy strategies and skills. -Involve students in collaborative writing projects. -Teach students to use the writing process - in particular, how to revise and edit.
Uses of Independent Reading and Writing
-Create opportunities for students to practice the reading and writing strategies and skills they have learned. -Provide authentic literacy experiences in which students choose their own topics, purposes, and materials. -Develop lifelong readers and writers.
Purposes of Classroom Assessment
-Determining Students' Reading Levels -Monitoring Students' Progress -Diagnosing Students' Strengths and Weaknesses -Documenting Students' Learning
Classroom Assessment Tools
-Observation of students as they participate in instructional activities. -Running records of students' oral reading to analyze their ability to solve reading problems. -Examination of students' work. -Conferences to talk with students about their reading and writing. -Checklists to monitor students' learning. -Rubrics to assess students' writing and other activities. *The results of yearly, high-stakes standardized tests also provide evidence of students' literacy achievement.
4 Instructional Programs
1. Basal Reading Programs 2. Literature Focus Units 3. Literature Circles 4. Reading and Writing Workshop
5 Stages of the Reading Process
1. Phonemic Awareness and Phonics 2. Word Identification 3. Fluency 4. Vocabulary 5. Comprehension
Key Features of the Reading Process (5 Stages)
1. Prereading 2. Reading 3. Responding 4. Exploring 5. Applying
Key Features of Prereading
-Activate or build background knowledge and related vocabulary -Set purposes -Introduce key vocabulary words -Make predictions -Preview the text
Key Features of Reading
-Read independently, with a buddy, or using shared or guided reading, or listen to the text read aloud -Apply reading strategies and skills -Examine illustrations, charts, and diagrams -Read the text from beginning to end -Read one or more sections of text to learn specific information -Take notes
Key Features of Responding
-Write in reading logs -Participate in grand conversation or other discussions
Key Features of Exploring
-Reread all or part of the text -Learn new vocabulary words -Participate in minilessons on reading strategies and skills -Examine the author's craft -Identify memorabile quotes
Key Features of Applying
-Construct projects -Read related books -Use information in thematic units -Evaluate the reading experience
Types of Reading: Independent Reading
Students read a text on their own without teacher scaffolding.
Types of Reading: Buddy Reading
Two students take turns as they read a text together.
Types of Reading: Guided Reading
Teacher supports students as they apply reading strategies and skills to read a text.
Types of Reading: Shared Reading
Teacher reads aloud while students follow along using a big book or individual copies.
Types of Reading: Reading Aloud to Students
Teacher reads aloud and provides opportunities for students to be actively involved in the experience.