Comprehensive Definition Segmenting is breaking a spoken word into individual sounds (phonemes). It is the inverse of Blending. Crucial for spelling (encoding). Practical Example Teacher says "swift". Student segments /s/-/w/-/i/-/f/-/t/. Then writes 'swift’. Take the irregular word said. A student can decode the s and the d straightforwardly, since those letters represent their expected sounds. The […]
Comprehensive Definition A homophone is one of two or more words that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning and, in most cases, spelling. Common examples include "to", "too", and "two"; "their", "there", and "they're"; and "hear" and "here". The term comes from the Greek "homos" meaning same and "phone" meaning sound. Homophones are […]
Comprehensive Definition An inflectional ending is a morpheme added to the end of a word to change its grammatical function without changing its core meaning or its part of speech. The word "cat" and the word "cats" refer to the same kind of animal; the inflectional ending "-s" only signals that there is more than […]
Comprehensive Definition Implicit phonics refers to instructional approaches in which letter-sound relationships are not explicitly taught, but are expected to be inferred by students through exposure to whole words in reading. The teacher does not directly teach that the grapheme "sh" represents the phoneme /sh/; rather, the student is expected to notice this pattern after […]
Comprehensive Definition Universal screening is a brief, standardised assessment administered to all students at regular points across the school year to identify those at risk of literacy difficulty. The word "universal" is the defining feature: every student is screened, not only those a teacher has already identified as struggling. This systematic approach catches students who […]
Comprehensive Definition Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, specifically how words are built from smaller units of meaning called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning. The word "cats" contains two morphemes: "cat", which means a small domesticated animal, and "-s", which means more than one. […]
Comprehensive Definition A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in language. It cannot be divided into smaller parts without losing or changing its meaning. The word "cat" is a single morpheme; breaking it into "c", "a", and "t" leaves only sounds, not meaning. The word "cats" contains two morphemes: "cat", which carries the meaning […]
Comprehensive Definition Metacognition is the awareness and regulation of one's own thinking and learning. The term, introduced by John Flavell in the 1970s, translates literally as "thinking about thinking". In a reading context, metacognition refers to the reader's ability to monitor whether they are understanding a text, recognise when comprehension breaks down, and select strategies […]
Comprehensive Definition Morpheme awareness is the ability to consciously reflect on and manipulate the meaningful parts of words. While the morpheme is the unit itself, morpheme awareness is what a reader does with that unit: identifying the parts inside a word, combining parts to form new words, separating a base from its affixes, and using […]
Comprehensive Definition A Norm-Referenced Test is a standardised assessment that compares an individual student's performance to a nationally or regionally representative sample of same-age or same-grade peers (the "norm group"). Rather than measuring mastery of specific skills, it reports a relative normative score, most commonly a standard score (with a mean of 100 and a […]
Comprehensive Definition Non-Word Reading is the decoding of phonetically regular nonsense words (for example, blik or troon). Because the words are invented, they cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from context, so the student has no choice but to apply their phonic knowledge: sounding out each grapheme and blending the sounds together. This makes […]
Comprehensive Definition Orthographic Mapping is the cognitive process by which the brain forms lasting connections between the sounds in a spoken word (its phonemes), the letters that represent those sounds (its graphemes), and the word's meaning. Through this process a word becomes a sight word, recognised instantly and effortlessly, without the need to sound it […]
Comprehensive Definition Oral Language is the system of spoken words people use to understand and express ideas. It develops before and underpins written language, making it the foundation on which literacy is built. Oral Language is made up of several interrelated components: phonology (the sound system of the language), vocabulary (knowledge of words and their […]
Comprehensive Definition Listening Comprehension is the ability to understand spoken language: following the meaning of words, sentences, and connected text that is heard rather than read. In the context of reading, it is significant because it represents a student's language comprehension free of any decoding demand. When a text is read aloud to a student, […]
Comprehensive Definition Onset-Rime describes a way of splitting a single syllable into two phonological units. The onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster, such as the c in cat or the str in street. The rime is the vowel and any consonants that follow it, such as the at in cat or the eet […]
Comprehensive Definition High-Frequency Words are the words that occur most often in written and spoken English. They are identified through corpus analysis, in which large bodies of text are counted, ranked, and aggregated to produce ordered lists of the most common words. The concentration is striking. The single most common word in English, "the", accounts […]
Comprehensive Definition Structured Synthetic Phonics (SSP) is an evidence-based method teaching reading and spelling. It explicitly and systematically teaches the relationships between phonemes (the individual speech sounds in spoken words) and graphemes (the letters and letter combinations that represent those sounds). Children learn to read by converting graphemes into phonemes and blending those phonemes together […]
Comprehensive Definition The schwa (/ə/) is the vowel sound that unstressed syllables most commonly reduce to, and it is the most frequent vowel sound in English. It is the relaxed "uh" or “i” sound heard in the unstressed syllables of multisyllabic words, such as the first and final vowel in banana. It also appears in […]
Comprehensive Definition Systematic instruction means teaching content in a planned, logical order set out in a scope and sequence, moving from simpler to more complex ones, so that learning is cumulative and each new step builds on what has already been secured. It is the opposite of teaching skills incidentally or in whatever order they […]
Comprehensive Definition Small group instruction is teaching delivered to a small, targeted group of students who share a specific and current learning need. By reducing the number of students, the teacher can pitch the content precisely, give more frequent feedback, and provide closer scaffolding than is possible with a whole class. It is one of […]
View Dates
Login
Register
(0)
