Definition of Terms

Definition of Terms: 

        Phonological System – The phonological system is the sound of language.  It is what you hear.  Phonological awareness means hearing   the  sounds in words.  It is the realization that words are made up of sequences of sounds.

Orthographic System – The orthographic system deals with the form of letters and the spelling patterns within words.  Orthographic awareness is what you see.  It requires visual perception.

Balanced Instruction – Studies point to a number of instructional practices that can promote young children's literacy learning (IRA, 1999).  For any or all these practices to be effective they must fit and respond with the children's needs in learning to read.  Knowing how reading approaches should be combined, and how much time should be devoted to each, is strongly dependent on the individuals in each individual setting.  Balanced Instruction, or also termed Comprehensive Instruction, is based on the aforementioned.  Although research has clearly established that no one method is superior for all children (Bond & Dykstra 1967; Snow, Burns & Griffin 1988, in IRA Position Statement, 1999), approaches that favor some type of systematic code instruction along with meaningful connected reading report children's superior progress in reading.  A Balanced Approach realizes that skilled reading is fluent, accurate word identification.  Simply word calling, often the result of experience in pure phonics instruction only, is not reading.  Reading is comprehension.  A balanced approach incorporates the necessary intensity and best elements of phonics instruction with meaning based instruction.

Phonics teaches students to “decode” with a systematic structured curriculum.  Whole Language stresses the use of whole, uncontrived texts and encourages children to use language in ways that relate to their own lives and cultures.  In a Balanced Instruction Approach children are explicitly taught the relationship between letters and sounds, but they are also reading interesting stories and writing their own.

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Phonics – A way of teaching reading and spelling that stresses symbol-sound relationships, used especially in beginning instruction (Harris & Hodges, p. 186).  Although phonics helps students gain independence and reliance in reading, it is only one aspect of the reading process.  Phonics instruction may be delivered in many forms, for example,

Explicit phonics – each sound is associated with a letter in the word and individual letter sounds are pronounced in isolation.

Implicit phonics – (also known as Analytic Phonics) does not present sounds associated with letters in isolation, rather, for example, children listen to words that begin with a particular sound and then search for another word that begins with the same sound – “girl, game, get”.

Deasy and Deckers (2001) state three essential components of effective phonics instruction.

1.      Phonemic Awareness – aware of sounds in spoken words

2.      Sound-Letter Associations – discovering the match between sounds and letters in written words

3.      Use of Strategy – transfer of sound/letter knowledge to reading and writing

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Phonemic Awareness – Phonemic Awareness (P.A.) is the ability to recognize that a spoken word is composed of a sequence of individual sounds (phonemes).  Children who are unaware that words consist of individual sounds will have difficulty in decoding.  Cunningham (2000) defines P.A. as the ability to examine language independently of meaning and to manipulate its component sounds.  P.A. enables children to use letter-sound correspondences to read and spell words.

Next to knowledge of letters, phonemic awareness is a good predictor of children's' first-year reading achievement.  Both knowledge of letters, and P.A., have been found to bear a strong and direct relationship to success and ease of reading acquisition.  This awareness is acquired gradually through experiences with spoken and written language.

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Phonological Awareness – Phonological Awareness is the awareness of the sound structure of language in general (Yopp, 2000).  Phonological Awareness is knowing that oral language has a structure that is separate from meaning.  It is attending to the structure “with-in” words.  For example, a student with phonologic awareness understands “beg” has one syllable and three phonemes; “egg” has one syllable and two phonemes.

Phonological Awareness encompasses larger units of sound as well as phonemes, such as syllables and onsets and rimes.  It is the ability to generate and recognize rhyming words, to count syllables, to separate the beginning of a word from it's ending, and to identify each of the phonemes in a word.

Guided Reading- This approach has varied definitions as one studies several experts.  Most seem to be in agreement that guided reading is a context in which a teacher supports the reader's development of effective strategies for processing novel texts at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996).  Some advocate for homogeneous grouping according to ability level, some suggest heterogeneous groups (mixed ability levels).  All seem to agree that the role of the reader is to discover the author's meaning (Routman, 1991), and that meaning is the purpose of all reading.

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