What do these terms mean?
As an educator or parent who is delving into the world of dyslexia and structured literacy for the first time, you will come across terms that may seem foreign and difficult to understand. I thought it might be wise to outline some of these terms and what they mean…a cheat sheet of sorts.
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE is the idea that letters and letter patterns represent sounds in an orthography or writing system.
AUTOMATICITY is fluency without having to think about it.
CONSONANT is a sound that is not a vowel. There are 21 consonants in the alphabet but some consonant combinations can create different sounds altogether. We have over 40 consonant sounds in the English language.
CONSONANT DIGRAPH is a written combination of consonants that make one speech sound. Examples of this are th, ph, ch.
DECODABLE TEXT is text in which most of the words contain letter/sound relationships that have already been taught. Decodable texts provide practice with decoding skills, rather than guessing or memorising words.
ENCODING is the process of breaking spoken words into sounds for the purpose of writing/spelling.
GRAPHEME is a letter or letter combination that spells a single sound. Examples can be e, ea, ee, ey, y which are different ways to write the one sound.
ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING is the process used for automatically storing and retrieving words. Orthographic mapping relies on good phonemic awareness, good sound and letter pattern knowledge and recognising written patterns.
PHONEMIC AWARENESS is the understanding that words are made up of sounds that are represented by letters and letter combinations.
PREFIX - the letters we add to the beginning of a word to make a new word with a different meaning. Examples are helpful – unhelpful, legal - illegal.
SUFFIX – the letters added to a root or base word to change the word class, tense, meaning or to add additional information. Examples are end – ending, inform – information.
VOWEL is a letter representing a vowel sound. There are 5 vowels in the alphabet, a, e, i, o, u and there are 15 vowel sounds in the English language.
There are so many more terms that are an important part of learning the English language but I had to stop somewhere!
Happy learning!
Sue Austin