What do the terms mean?
ScholarSkills: definitions of terms on the reading chart
Phonemic awareness is the process by which children learn how to distinguish the distinct sounds that we use to create all of the spoken words in our language. Kids learn to recognize these 44 spoken sounds or phonemes by listening interactively to stimulating poems, rhymes, stories, and conversations.
Building Word and World Knowledge
At each stage of development, students must continue building oral vocabulary and knowledge about the world (background knowledge) by participating in enriching cultural experiences, listening to and interacting verbally with stimulating stories, poems, and conversations, watching and discussing informational videos, and by listening to and discussing informational readings about science, history, music, and art.
Phonics is the method of teaching reading that shows students how to associate sounds with symbols known as alphabetic letters. Students learn how to sound, say, and spell each word rapidly, accurately, and precisely by identifying its sequence of sounds and the letter-symbols that represent those sounds. Students should practice phonetic structures by spelling and reading decodable texts.
Fluency is the ability to read words and sentences accurately, articulately, and precisely.
Vocabulary acquisition is the process of learning what words mean by studying their structures (roots, prefixes, and suffixes) and identifying them with the concepts they communicate and the network of ideas to which they belong.
Grammar is the system of standardized rules about language, which helps us to communicate coherently. It helps students to identify the parts of speech and how writers use those elements to organize and communicate their ideas clearly, creatively, and concisely.
Sentence construction is the art of using vocabulary and grammar to communicate ideas clearly and concisely.
Sentence comprehension is the ability to understand each sentence’s main idea by analyzing how the writer uses specific words and grammatical style to convey meaning and how each sentence is related to the sentences that come before or after it.
Reading comprehension is the ability to read larger bodies of text such as poems, essays, short stories, and books with understanding, confidence, and excellence. Reading comprehension is the culmination of phonetic word recognition, vocabulary acquisition, grammatical skill, and knowledge about the world.
To read any text with confidence and excellence, students must be able to do all of the following:
1.read fluently by recognizing each word and sequence of words rapidly, automatically, and precisely
2.have background knowledge of the subject matter
3.have a rich understanding of most (if not all) of the words
4.analyze sentence structure through a comprehensive knowledge of grammatical elements
5.connect ideas coherently within, between, and across sentences throughout the text
To read with comprehension, confidence, and excellence, students must learn to analyze the sequence of sounds in words, the sequence of words in sentences, and the sequence of sentences in paragraphs.