active voice - A verb form in which the subject of the verb carries out some action. Example: He hit the ball.

affix - A bound (nonword) morpheme that changes the meaning or function of a root or stem to which it is attached, such as the prefix ad- and the suffix -ing in adjoining.

alliteration - The repetition of the same sound, usually of a consonant, at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other or at short intervals. Example: The repetition of f and g in fields ever fresh, groves ever green

alphabetic principle - The assumption underlying alphabetic writing systems that each speech sound or phoneme of a language should have its own distinctive graphic representation.

analogy - A resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike.

anecdotal scripting -The systematic recording of behavioral incidents cited in a literary work for purposes of organization and clarity.

annotated bibliography -The inclusion of additional comments in the works listed in the standard bibliography.

antecedent - A word, phrase, or clause to which a following pronoun refers. Example: Iris tried, but she couldn't find the book. Iris is the antecedent of she.

appeal to reason - A call upon the reader's faculty to think in a rational way to persuade his or her thoughts.

appeal to authority - A call upon an individual or other source as an expert to strengthen an argument made by the author of a work.

appeal to emotion - The ad populum approach is a common fallacy in arguments. Instead of presenting evidence in an argument, it relies on expressive language and other devices calculated to incite enthusiasm, excitement, anger, or hatred.

appeal to pathos (pity) - A common fallacy in arguments, the ad misericordiam approach is a special case of the appeal to emotion in which the altruism and mercy of the audience are the special emotions to which the speaker appeals.

appositive - A word or phrase that restates or modifies an immediately preceding noun. Note: An appositive is often useful as a context clue for determining or refining the meaning of the word or words to which it refers. Example: My son Enrico (appositive) is twelve years old.

archetypal criticism - The study of apparent perennial images, themes, symbols, stories, and myths in literature, including narratives that unite the seasons with literary genres.

archetype - The original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies; a perfect example.

attack ad hominem - An attack "against the man"; a fallacious attack in which the thrust is directed, not at the conclusion one wishes to deny, but at the person who asserts or defends it.

bandwagon - A popular party, faction, or cause that attracts growing support; a current or fashionable trend.

base word - A word to which affixes may be added to create related words. Example: Teach in reteach or teaching.

blend - A combination of sounds represented by letters to pronounce a word; sounding out the joining of the sounds represented by two or more letters with minimal change in those sounds, such as the consonant cluster in /gr/ in grow, /spl/ in splash.

boundary - A division between units of a language, such as between words, word parts, or syllables.

climax - The point of highest dramatic tension or a major turning point in the action (such as in a play, story, or other literary composition).

clustering - A content field technique or strategy to help students freely associate ideas in their experience with a keyword proposed by the teacher, thus forming a group of related concepts; a teaching process of relating a target word to a set of synonyms and other word associations. Note: Clustering may be used to stimulate the recall of related ideas in reading and writing, especially in prewriting.

complement - The word (or words) that completes the action in the predicate of a sentence; to complete a grammatical construction in this way. Example: Tom is a policeman (complement).

compound sentence - A sentence consisting of two or more coordinate independent clauses. Example: George talked and Harry listened.

concrete image - A literal representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by more than one of the senses; representation that involves no necessary change or extension in the obvious meaning of the words; the words call up a sensory representation of the literal object or sensation.

consonant doubling - The addition of a consonant in the formation of some gerunds and participles. Example: Running.

context clues - The information from the immediate textual setting that helps identify a word for decoding (sounding out) and words being read for the first time. The reader's speaking vocabulary is a back-up strategy and is primarily useful to resolve ambiguity (is bread pronounced bred or breed?) and to confirm the accuracy of decoding (does it make sense and does it sound right?). The context helps resolve which shade of meaning is intended (prog-ress or pro-gress) and is used for learning the meaning of new words that can be decoded or pronounced but are not yet in the reader's speaking vocabulary; it is a primary strategy.

decoding - The ability and willingness to sound out words by generating all the sounds into a recognizable word (technically called phonological recoding). The ability to get the meaning of a word quickly, effortlessly, and unconsciously after a brief visual scan, such as in automaticity with individual words (which is the product of initial phonological decoding, followed by the reading of that word successfully several times, preferably in text, until the neural connections among the letters, the sounds, and the meaning of the word are fully established).

denouement - The final outcome of the main dramatic event in a literary work.

description - One of the four traditional forms of composition in speech and writing, it is meant to give a verbal picture of the character and event, including the setting.

digraphs - Two letters that represent one speech sound, such as ch for /ch/ in chin or ea for /e/ in bread.

discourse - A conversation; the act or result of making a formal written or spoken presentation on a subject; in linguistics, any form of oral or written communication more extensive than a sentence.

etymology - The history of words; the study of the history of words.

exposition - One of the four traditional forms of composition in speech and writing, it is intended to set forth or explain. Note: Good exposition is clear in conception, well organized, and understandable. It may include limited amounts of argumentation, description, and narration to achieve that purpose.

expressive writing - Highly personal writing, such as in diaries, personal letters, and autobiographies.

false causality - Any reasoning that relies upon treating as the cause of a thing that which is not really its cause (e.g., the error of concluding that an event is caused by another simply because it follows that other).

fluency - The clear, easy, written or spoken expression of ideas; freedom from word-identification problems that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading; automaticity; the ability to execute motor movements smoothly, easily, and readily.

high-frequency words - A word that appears many more times than most other words in spoken or written language. Note: Basic word lists generally provide words ranked in order of their frequency of occurrence as calculated from a sample of written or spoken text suitable for the level of intended use.

historical investigation - The techniques used by historians to reconstruct and interpret the past. (reports) Note: The data for historical research are the spoken, written, and printed sources or other material originating from those who participated in or witnessed the events studied; the historian must evaluate these data for authenticity, bias, and generalizability and draw conclusions from them.

homograph - A word with the same spelling as another word but having a different meaning or sometimes a different pronunciation. Example: Bow, as in ~ and arrow compared to ~ of a ship.

homophone - A word with a different origin and meaning but having the same pronunciation as another word whether or not spelled alike. Example: Hair and hare; scale, as in ~ of a fish compared to ~ a ladder. Also two or more graphemes that represent the same sound. Example: The /k/ sound in /c/andy, k/ing, and s/ch/ool.

idiom - A use of words peculiar to a particular language.

initial consonants (initial blends) - The joining of two or more consonant sounds, represented by letters,that begin a word without losing the identity of the sounds, such as /bl/ in black, /skr/ in scramble; the joining of the first consonant and vowel sounds in a word, such as /b/ and /a/ in baby. Note: This process is regarded by some to be a crucial step in learning phonics.

irregularity - An exception to a linguistic pattern or rule. Example: Good, better, and best are exceptions to the usual -er, -est pattern of comparatives and superlatives in English.

literary analysis - The study of a literary work by a critic, student, or scholar; a careful, detailed reading and report thereof. literary criticism The analysis and judgment of works of literature. The body of principles by which the work of writers is judged. Note: The principles used in judging a literary work vary from the highly personal and subjective to the relatively objective; they may involve but are not limited to specific consideration of moral values, historical accuracy, and literary form and type; they may be different from one literary period to another.

main idea - The gist of a passage; central thought; the chief topic of a passage expressed or implied in a word or phrase; the topic sentence of a paragraph; a statement that gives the explicit or implied major topic of a passage and the specific way in which the passage is limited in content or reference.

media sources - The means of communication, especially of mass communication, such as books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, motion pictures, recordings.

metaphor - A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them. Example: He was drowning in money.

narration - One of the four traditional forms of composition in speech and writing, it tells a story or gives an account of something dealing with sequences of events and experiences, though not necessarily in strict order.

nonverbal - A nonlanguage communication, such as a noise, gesture, or facial expression.

nonsense syllable - A pronounceable combination of graphic characters, usually trigrams, that do not make a word, such as kak, vor, mek, pronounced in English as spellings. Note: Nonsense syllables are sometimes used in reading to test phonics knowledge; they are sometimes used in spelling to test for desired syllabic patterns while avoiding known words.

onomatopoeia - The term used to describe words whose pronunciations suggest their meaning (e.g., meow, buzz).

oral histories - The stories and histories kept alive by the spoken word rather than the written word. Note: Although an oral tradition is characteristic of an oral culture, it may coexist in a writing culture.

orthography - The study of the nature and use of symbols in a writing system; correct or standardized spelling according to established usage in a given language.

parallelism - The phrasing of language so as to balance ideas of equal importance. Note: Parallelism may apply to phrases, sentences, paragraphs, longer passages, or whole selections.

passive voice - A verb form in which the subject of the verb is the receiver of some action or state indicated by the verb. Example: He was hit by the ball.

persuasion - One of the four traditional forms of composition in speech and writing, it is meant to move the reader by argument or entreaty to a belief or position.

phoneme - A minimal sound unit of speech that, when contrasted with another phoneme, affects the naming of words in a language, such as /b/ in book contrasts with /t/ in took, /k/ in cook, /h/ in hook. Note: The phoneme is an abstract concept manifested in actual speech as a phonetic variant, such as the allophones of the phoneme /t/ in top, stop, pot.

phonemic awareness - The awareness of the sounds (phonemes) that make up spoken words. Such awareness does not appear when young children learn to talk; the ability is not necessary for speaking and understanding spoken language; however, phonemic awareness is important for learning to read. In alphabetic languages, letters (and letter clusters) represent phonemes; to learn the correspondences between letters and sounds, one must have some understanding of the notion that words are made up of phonemes.

phonics - A system of teaching reading and spelling that stresses basic symbol-sound relationships and their application in decoding words; a system used especially in beginning instruction.

phonogram - A graphic character or symbol that may represent a phonetic sound, phoneme, or word; in word recognition, a graphic sequence composed of a vowel grapheme and an ending consonant grapheme, such as -ed in red, bed, fed.

prewriting - The initial creative stage of writing, prior to drafting, in which the writer formulates ideas, gathers information, and considers ways in which to organize the information; planning.

principal parts of verbs - The principal parts; the set of inflected forms of a grammatical class, such as sing, sang, sung.

prior knowledge - The knowledge that stems from previous experience. Note: Prior knowledge is a major component of schema theories of reading comprehension in spite of the redundancy inherent in the term.

r-controlled sound - The modified sound of a vowel immediately preceding /r/ in the same syllable, such as in care, never, sir, or curse.

red herring - A distractor that draws attention away from the real issue.

rhetorical strategies - The traditional forms of composition in speech and writing: exposition, narration, persuasion, and description (each is defined in this glossary).

root word - The meaningful base form of a complex word after all affixes are removed. Note: A root may be independent or free, such as read in unreadable, or may be dependent, or bound, such as -liter- (from the Greek for letter) in illiterate.

sentences:

declarative - A sentence that makes a statement.

exclamatory - A sentence that makes a vehement statement or conveys strong or sudden emotion.

imperative - A sentence that expresses a command or request.

interrogative - A sentence that asks a question or makes an inquiry.

sight word - A word that is immediately recognized as a whole and does not require word analysis for identification.

standard American English - The language in which most educational texts and government and media publications are written in the United States. Note: Standard American English, a relative concept, varies widely in pronunciation and in idiomatic use but maintains a fairly uniform grammatical structure.

syllabication - The division of words into syllables (the minimal units of sequential speech sounds composed of a vowel sound or a vowel-consonant combination, such as /a/, /ba/, /ab/, /bab/).

theme - A topic of discussion or writing; a major idea or proposition broad enough to cover the entire scope of a literary or other work of art. Note: A theme may be stated or implicit, but clues to it may be found in the ideas that are given special prominence or tend to recur in a work.

thesis - The basic argument advanced by a speaker or writer who then attempts to prove it; the subject or major argument of a speech or composition.

topic - The general category or class of ideas, often stated in a word or phrase, to which the ideas of a passage as a whole belong.

topic sentence - A sentence intended to express the main idea in a paragraph or passage.

transitive verb - A verb that takes a direct object. Example: Francesca read (transitive verb) the book.

voice - A syntactic pattern that indicates the verb-subject relationship; the principal voices in English and many other languages are active and passive.

word recognition - The process of determining the pronunciation and some degree of meaning of a word in written or printed form; the quick and easy identification of the form, pronunciation, and appropriate meaning of a word previously encountered in print or writing.