Glossary of Terms: Reading
Understand or make meaning from text. These are the essential connections a reader brings to and gets from reading. As readers develop, their background knowledge, the text features, and ideas with the sentences and paragraphs help them construct a meaningful whole. Word meanings and thinking/reasoning skills are used to process and make sense of the text.
Different Purposes:
The reason or motivation for reading a particular form of text. These include reading for information, reading to perform a task, reading for literary experience, reading for career applications, reading for enjoyment or personal interests.
Guided Reading:
A highly recommended instructional practice in which one or more students who are at similar levels of reading development meet to read materials at their instructional level. The teacher guides the students through the material by using comments and questions to demonstrate and develop a full range and balance of strategies needed for independent decoding and comprehension of the text. Instructional level materials are read with 90-95% accuracy and 70-90% comprehension.
Independent Reading:
A high recommended reading activity in which students read on their own, either orally or silently, materials where they are 96-100% accurate and have 90% better comprehension.
Monitor Progress:
Ability to evaluate whether you are behaving in a way which will lead toward a particular goal. This includes self-checking on a consistent basis to determine if the steps toward a goal are being made, proceeding if they are, and stopping to readjust if they aren’t.
Partner Read:
Two students read with each other and can control most of the text as with independent reading.
Read Aloud:
One person (Example: teacher) reads aloud to others (Example: students). Materials may be well above instructional reading level of the listener.
Reader’s Workshop:
One person (Example: teacher) reads aloud to others (Example: students). Materials may be well above instructional reading level of the listener.
Sets Goals:
A life thinking skill where a target is defined along with the steps needed to attain it and a plan for timing and monitoring progress.
Shared Reading:
A highly recommended reading practice in which the teacher gives a high amount of support to students while encouraging their participation in reading above instructional level materials. The print is enlarged or otherwise accessible to students through multiple copies. The effective reading strategies can be demonstrated and practiced with a variety of more advanced literature. Being done in a supported situation, students can learn new techniques which will then stretch their abilities when they read on their own.
Skills:
The knowledge and ability to perform a specific process in the act of reading. Example: Directionality skill, one-to-one correspondence skill (these are observable behaviors), locating word skill, decoding skill, comprehension skill.
Strategies:
In the hard problem-solving activities used by the reader to access and combine all the sources of information so that they can construct meaning from text. Strategies require self-initiation, self-monitoring, and self-correction. These are supported by thought processes such as analysis, evaluation and synthesis. Strategies are not observable behaviors. They must be inferred from behavior or student reflection and report.