Question 1

Phonemic Awareness

Accepted Answer

The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes--in spoken words.

Question 2

Phonological Awareness

Accepted Answer

The understanding that spoken language words can be broken into individual phonemes.

Question 3

Alphabetic Principle

Accepted Answer

The understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.

Question 4

Morpheme

Accepted Answer

The smallest meaningful unit of language.

Question 5

Free Morpheme

Accepted Answer

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Question 6

Bound Morpheme

Accepted Answer

A morpheme that always attaches to other morphemes, never existing as a word itself.

Question 7

Affixes

Accepted Answer

Parts of a word (like prefixes and suffixes) that change the meaning of the base word.

Question 8

Derivational Morphemes

Accepted Answer

Affixes that are added to a base word and can change its meaning and sometimes its part of speech.

Question 9

Inflectional Morphemes

Accepted Answer

Affixes that are added to a base word without changing its meaning but express grammatical relationships.

Question 10

Decoding

Accepted Answer

The ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words.

Question 11

Automaticity

Accepted Answer

The ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit.

Question 12

Fluency

Accepted Answer

The ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression and comprehension.

Question 13

Sight Words

Accepted Answer

Words in the English language that are recognized immediately without having to be sounded out.

Question 14

Grapheme

Accepted Answer

The smallest unit in a written language that represents a phoneme in the phonology of a language.

Question 15

Digraphs

Accepted Answer

A pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.

Question 16

Diphthongs

Accepted Answer

A complex speech sound or glide that begins with one vowel and gradually changes to another vowel within the same syllable.

Question 17

Schwa

Accepted Answer

The vowel sound in many lightly pronounced unaccented syllables in English language.

Question 18

Consonant Blend

Accepted Answer

Two or more consecutive consonants which maintain their own speech sounds (phonemes) within a word.

Question 19

Syllable

Accepted Answer

A unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word.

Question 20

Onset and Rime

Accepted Answer

In a syllable, the onset is the initial consonantal cluster, and the rime is the vowel and any consonants that follow it.

Question 21

Prosody

Accepted Answer

The rhythmic and intonational aspect of language.

Question 22

Semantic Clues

Accepted Answer

Using context clues in a sentence or passage to derive the meaning of an unknown word.

Question 23

Syntactic Clues

Accepted Answer

Using grammar clues in a sentence or passage to derive the meaning of an unknown word.

Question 24

Metacognitive Strategies

Accepted Answer

Techniques used to help individuals plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning and performance.

Question 25

Cloze Procedure

Accepted Answer

An assessment method used to determine a student's reading level by deleting words from a passage and asking the student to fill in the blanks.

Question 26

Reading Comprehension

Accepted Answer

The ability to process text, understand its meaning, and integrate with what the reader already knows.

Question 27

Literal Comprehension

Accepted Answer

Understanding the explicit or straight forward information in a reading passage.

Question 28

Inferential Comprehension

Accepted Answer

Understanding the implicit or inferred information in a reading passage.

Question 29

Evaluative Comprehension

Accepted Answer

Forming a judgment or opinion based on the information in a reading passage.

Question 30

Text Features

Accepted Answer

Components of a story or article that are not the main body of text, including titles, headings, pictures, captions, bullets, etc.

Question 31

Narrative Text

Accepted Answer

A type of writing that tells a story or describes a sequence of events in an entertaining way.

Question 32

Expository Text

Accepted Answer

Non-fiction writing that informs, explains, describes, or defines something to the reader.

Question 33

Metaphor

Accepted Answer

A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things without using "like" or "as."

Question 34

Simile

Accepted Answer

A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as."

Question 35

Hyperbole

Accepted Answer

An exaggerated statement used to emphasize an idea or make a point.

Question 36

Personification

Accepted Answer

A figure of speech where human qualities are given to animals, objects or ideas.

Question 37

Theme

Accepted Answer

The underlying message or big idea that the writer wants to convey in a story or poem.

Question 38

Main Idea

Accepted Answer

The primary concept of a passage, which includes the subject of the passage and the specific way that it's being dealt with.

Question 39

Supporting Details

Accepted Answer

Information, facts, descriptions, examples, etc., that support the main idea.

Question 40

Foreshadowing

Accepted Answer

A literary device used to hint at future events in the story.

Question 41

Irony

Accepted Answer

A figure of speech where words are used in a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words.

Question 42

Point of View

Accepted Answer

The perspective from which a story is told.

Question 43

Context Clues

Accepted Answer

Hints that the author provides to help define a difficult or unusual word.

Question 44

Figurative Language

Accepted Answer

Language that uses words or expressions with a meaning that is different from the literal interpretation.

Question 45

Schema Theory

Accepted Answer

A psychological principle suggesting that we learn and remember by associating new information with what we already know.

Connecticut Foundations of Reading: Advanced Concepts