What Parents Need to Know About Literacy ‘Words’-It Can Be CONFUSING!?#@

The new school year is now pretty well underway, so many students have been screened, tested, assessed–whatever your child(ren)’s school(s) wish to call it. Getting the results, as well as the ‘plans’ for literacy instruction can be confusing–if not a bit overwhelming. You will likely receive, or have received, paperwork with these terms, as well as numbers. And it is the time of year when many schools are holding Parent-Teacher Conferences.

What Is Literacy?

This ‘umbrella term’ refers to the ability to READ, WRITE, SPELL, LISTEN and SPEAK with understanding in order to communicate and share ideas with others.

‘Testing’ Terminology

Parents and teachers need to understand these terms in order to have a better handle on how the student discussed fares in comparison with same age/grade peers, what is expected at a particular point in time, and to quantify how much intervention/remediation, if any, is warranted. Please do remember that a screening/test score is nothing more than how a student achieves at one point in time. Students may be ill, fatigued, upset, hungry, etc., which may negatively affect screening/test scores.

Universal Literacy Screener (ULS) Universal Literacy Screeners (ULS) evaluate the literacy skills of all students in a school or district. ULS is a brief proactive assessment which helps to identify students who may be ‘at risk’ of developing literacy with the goal of providing intervention to those students who are deemed ‘at risk’. A ULS is not used to diagnose literacy issues or provide progress monitoring based upon the results of classroom intervention.

Standardized Test A standardized test is any form of test that (1) requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from common bank of questions, in the same way, and (2) is scored in a “standard” or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual students or groups of students. These tests may be used to determine kindergarten readiness, overall academic achievement, eligibility for special education, or determination of meeting grade level expectations such as retention in Grade 3, as many states require certain scores in order to be promoted to Grade 4. Standardized Tests provide Percentile Rank, Standard Score, Age Equivalent, and sometimes Grade Equivalent scores.

Percentile Rank This term indicates the percentage of students performing less well than the student taking the test on a particular, identical test. For example, a student who has a percentile of 84 scored higher than 84% of the students; 16% of students performed equally well or better. 50th percentile is considered ‘average’ with a range of scores from 1st to 99th percentiles.

Standard Score (SS) SS is  a way to compare student performance to a standardization sample. Standard Scores in evaluation reports or standardized tests have a mean (average) of 100. If an average score is 100, this would translate into the 50th percentile; the 25th percentile would translate into a SS of 90; the 75th percentile would translate into a SS of 110.

Age Equivalent (AE) AE reflects the student’s performance in terms of the age level in the norming sample (all students who took this same test) of which the average score is the same as the student’s score. So an AE of, say, 8-6 would mean that the student score identically to a student who is 8 years 6 months of age.

Grade Equivalent (GE) The school year is divided into 10 months. The GE is the average performance in that year and month of school. Thus, a GE of 9-4 is the average performance of a ninth grader in the fourth month of school (December given a school year beginning early September of a given year. For many years now, reporting GE has gone far out of favor and may not even be reported.

Reading Terminology

Alphabetic Concept The idea that the sounds of oral language are represented by letters (graphemes) or groups of letters. This concept is the foundational basis of phonics instruction.

Decoding* In short, reading words–the ability to apply knowledge of sound/symbol relationships and knowledge of letter patterns in order to pronounce written words either automatically from previous exposures or to figure out words they have never seen before.

Heart Words These are high-frequency (meaning they appear in text very often–words such as: of, the, said, could, school, etc.) which are spelled irregularly–in other words, they do not have clear symbol/sound relationships. They are called ‘Heart Words’ because some parts of the words will need to be learned “by heart”. For example, the in the word ‘said’, neither the <a> nor the <i> correspond to the typical short (or long) vowel sounds. Heart Words are used so frequently that students need to know how to read and spell them effortlessly.

Sight Words/Snap Words Words that are recognized for reading ‘by sight’ or immediately, without the student needing to use decoding to figure out the sight or snap word., as well as understand the words’ meanings. In reality, “all words want to be sight words when they grow up”–first used by Dr. Jan Wasowicz, author of Learning by Design. For early readers, these are high frequency words, either phonetically regular (good 1:1 sound symbol correspondences) or Heart Words as described above. Skilled readers have the ability to accumulate tens of thousands of ‘Sight Words’ due to vast reading experience. Most proficient readers only need to ‘sound out’ or ‘decode’ unknown or foreign words, such as those found in prescription medications and the like. Some curricula for early readers refer to these words as ‘Snap Words’. Parents of early readers often receive reams of paper and flash cards–and are asked to review these cards at home frequently. IMHO, this fosters an approach more reliant upon memorization than decoding.

ORF (Oral Reading Fluency)* ORF`is often noted as #___WCPM, which is #___words correct per minute. In a screening tool such as DIBELS, the teacher times the student for 60 seconds, tallies up the total number of words read aloud, and then subtracts the number of words (or lines of text) either omitted or read incorrectly. In essence, fluency is the ability to read accurately with appropriate speed and expression so as to make reading comprehension occur. If a student reads accurately, but too quickly (often omitting punctuation), comprehension is often compromised. Here is a table, courtesy of Reading Rockets (Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2017) delineating WCPM as correlated to percentiles at different segments (beginning, mid-year, end) of the school year for grades 1-6.

Prosody* Prosody refers to the feature of reading related to reading with expression, phrasing, intonation and stress patterns. It can be described as the rhythm of language when speaking and/or reading.

RAN (Rapid Automatic Naming) RAN refers to the skill of quickly accessing presumably rote information (numbers, letters, colors, or objects). Students with slower than average with RAN typically struggle with word-level reading (David Kilpatrick). In addition, many students with slower than average RAN have issues developing ORF and may have general word retrieval issues (referring to items as “that”, “a thingy”, etc.

MAZE MAZE is a subtest of the DIBELS screener administered in grades 2-8. It is considered a screener for reading comprehension. Students silently read a passage for 3 minutes which has every 7th word omitted. Students are to choose the best of 3 multiple choices for each omitted word. It is considered a way to screen a student’s use of word recognition skills, background knowledge, and reasoning skills. 

Literal Comprehension This term refers to understanding what is directly stated in a text. In other words, being able to discuss questions such as ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘how’, and ‘when’. Students with weaker literal comprehension skills often encounter difficulty with inferential comprehension. For example, in the sentence: “It continued to snow all night in New England”, students would be able to answer: When did it snow? All night or Where did it snow? New England.

Inferential Comprehension This term refers to understanding information not directly stated in the text. Students use context clues and apply their own background knowledge to respond to these type of questions. For example, using the sentence above about snowing, students would be able to infer: What season is the author writing about? Winter or Would it be safe to drive all night in New England? No.

Sound Blending* This term refers to the ability to form words from individual sounds in sequence; for example, /b/../a/../t/ = bat. This helps new readers decode.

Syllable* A syllable is a word or part of a word with a vowel sound, which can be heard, and often it has consonants. It is frequently described as a push of a breath (the word boy has 1 syllable; the word fantastic has 3 syllables). Several consonants are ‘syllabic’, which means there is no written vowel as in the word rhythm where the ‘m’ alone produces a syllable.

Morphology* This term refers to the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Examples include: -s (to refer to plural as in bikes, present tense verb ending as in eats, or possession with the use of an apostrophe as in girl’s (singular possessive) and girls‘ (plural possessive).

Background Knowledge* This term refers to the information a reader already knows about the world from prior experience or information provided from a book, movie (or other audio-visual source), teacher, parent, and/or caregiver. Increased background knowledge helps readers make sense of the text, improving both reading skill and comprehension.

Phoneme* This term refers to the smallest unit of sound in a language. English has ~44 phonemes depending on dialect (regional differences in pronunciation).

Phonological Awareness (PA)* PA refers to the human ability to be aware of oral units of language including words, syllables, rhymes, and the individual units of sound (phonemes), which are blended together to form words (phonemic awareness). This skill is highly correlated to the development of literacy.

Phonemic Awareness* This term refers to the specific ability to focus upon and manipulate individual speech sounds (phonemes) into spoken words. This skill helps children to connect individual speech sounds to the actual letters “matching” the speech sounds and is highly correlated to the development of literacy.

Spelling/Writing Terminology

Encoding* This term is a fancy word for ‘spelling’. It involves the ability to apply knowledge of sound/letter relationships, knowledge of letter patterns, and the ability to sequence sounds in order to spell words either aloud or in writing. It is the ability to code from sounds to symbols.

Orthographic Pattern An orthographic pattern determines how letters and sounds correspond in a word. For example, think about ways to spell /ā/ (long ‘a’) in words such as: game, aim, paint, or relay—students need to know all of the ways to represent each sound using letter patterns of the alphabet–and know when to use each one (‘ai’ is typically used in the initial or middle position of words, while ‘ay’ is used typically at the ends of words, etc.).  Other orthographic patterns involve rules such as “English words do not end in ‘v’ or ‘j’ ” (words ending with /v/ are typically spelled with an additional ‘e’ as in ‘have’ or ‘involve’; English words ending in /j/ are typically spelled either ‘ge’ or ‘dge’ as in ‘age’ or ‘judge’). These patterns are learned via exposure to print, practice, and direct teaching. Many students who have dyslexia need far more practice learning the different orthographic patterns of English. Understanding orthographic patterns is an important step in literacy, especially in terms of becoming a proficient speller.

Fine Motor Skills Fine motor skills (as opposed to gross motor skills such as walking, running, throwing a ball, etc.) influence both spelling and writing, as students either write by hand or use a keyboard. Teaching students letter formations supports reading and language acquisition. Additionally, handwriting fluency (how quickly and legibly students can produce letter formations) is important, as students need to learn how to hold a writing instrument so as not to tire from the amount of writing typically done in school–even for older students.

Sound Segmenting* This term refers to the ability to hear a word (either from someone or in one’s own mind) and separate the word into its individual sounds in sequence. For example, ‘bat’ = /b/../a/../t/. This skill helps readers spell.

Grapheme* A grapheme is a unit or set of units of a writing system (such as letters or letter combinations) which represent a speech sound in a written language. Examples include: ‘t’ to represent /t/ as in ‘tot’, ‘ch’ to represent /ch/, /k/, or /sh/ in English as in ‘chair’, ‘ache’, or ‘chandelier’.

Would You Appreciate a Glossary of Terminology?

Enjoy the process of helping your child(ren) and students achieve literacy skills!