ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS

K - 12

GLOSSARY

Accountability- Responsibility for general school processes and student achievement, including confirming that resources were effectively used and using assessment results to provide information to the public about what children should have learned (Pomperaug Regional School District 15, 1996).

Anchor- Representative product or performance used to illustrate each point on a scoring rubric. The top anchor is sometimes called the exemplar (Arter & McTighe, 2001).

Assessment- Any systematic basis for making inferences about characteristics of people, usually based on various sources of evidence; the global process of synthesizing information about individuals in order to understand and describe them better (Arter & McTighe, 2001)

Audience- The intended readers, listeners or viewers for a particular work of performance.

Benchmark- An example of student work at a certain level of quality. For example, a benchmark for excellent persuasive writing at the 10^th grade level is used by students, teachers, parents and others to identify the goal of excellence for those students (Pomperaug Regional School District 15, 1996).

Character- A person or animal presented in a literary work.

Characterization- The technique a writer uses to bring a literary character to life.

Connotation- The emotional association a word evokes.

Content Standard- Goal statement identifying the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to be developed through instruction.

Criteria- Guidelines, rules, or principles by which student responses, products, or performances are judged.

Denotation- The literal definition of a word - as in the dictionary - without its emotional association.

Differentiated Instruction- Challenging and relevant instruction that meets the needs and interests of each learner. In a heterogeneous group, students receive scaffolded, multi-level instruction across content, processes, and product that enables each student to be successful (Tomlinson, 1998).

Essential Question- Go to the heart of a discipline. These questions are open-ended, recur naturally throughout one's learning an raise other important questions. They have no obvious right answer and are deliberately framed to provide and sustain student interest (Wiggins & Mc Tighe, 1998). The essential questions for English language arts include: Why do readers read and writers write? What makes writing worth reading?

Expository Writing- Functional, getting things done, step by step.

Fable- A brief story that illustrates a lesson or moral.

Fairy Tales- Stories that begin with "Once upon a time" and end with "They lived happily ever after." Story development often involves the triumph of good over evil.

Fantasy- A piece of writing that consciously breaks free from reality.

Figurative Language- Language that uses figures of speech, such as hyperbole, simile, metaphor, personification, symbol, or other forms of imagery.

Fluency- The clear, rapid and easy expression of ideas in writing or speaking.

Folk Tales- Story that has been passed down orally from one generation to another. Folk tales are retold and not written by one author. They are told to explain how things can to be.

Foreshadowing- The hint or suggestion of a coming event.

Functional Documents- Documents that exist in order to get things done.

Guided Reading - A teaching technique in which a student or students read - mostly silently - a carefully chosen book at their reading level, and the teacher supports, teaches, and evaluates as necessary (Routman, 2003).

Guided Writing- A context in which the teacher supports the writer's development of effective strategies for writing ideas at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty.

Homophone- One of two or more words pronounced alike, but different in meaning.

Hyperbole- A figure of speech that uses obvious and intentional exaggeration for special effect.

Independent Reading- On their own, readers choose and read books they enjoy and understand; usually involves daily sustained silent reading in school along with careful teacher monitoring (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001).

Interactive Writing- Students and teachers read aloud and talk about the work they are producing. This occurs during the process and not just when the work has been completed.

Learning Styles- Characteristic cognitive, affective, and physiological behaviors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how individual learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment (Jensen, 1999).

Legend (or Myth)- A popular narrative that supposedly has some historic basis.

Metaphor- A figure of speech in which a comparison is implied between two unlike objects.

Morpheme - A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as-ed of walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.

Narrative Procedure- A clear written guide to describe the steps in a complicated process.

Nonfiction- A factual report dealing with events and people that exist or existed in real life.

Performance Assessment- Assessment activity that requires students to construct a response, create a product, or perform a demonstration. Since performance assessments generally do not yield a single correct answer or solution method, evaluations of student products or performances are based on judgments guided by criteria (Arter & McTighe, 2001).

Performance Standard- An established level of achievement, quality or performance, or degree of proficiency. Performance standards specify how well students are expected to achieve or perform (Arter @ McTighe, 2001).

Personification- A figure of speech in which animals, ideas or inanimate objects are given human qualities.

Phoneme- A speech sound or utterance.

Phonemic Awareness- Sensitivity to and awareness of the fact that sounds make up spoken words; being able to discriminate between different consonants and to sequence each small unit of sound (phoneme) in a word (Routman, 2003).

Plot- The arrangement of incidents in a piece of literature.

Portfolio- A purposeful or systematic collection of selected student work and student self-assessments developed over time, gathered to demonstrate and evaluate progress and achievement in learning.

Read Aloud- Teachers (or students) read aloud excellent fiction and nonfiction to the class; hearing the material allows students to listen to idea and vocabulary they may not be ready to read on their own and introduces them to new authors and genres (Calkins, 1999)

Retelling- A recollection of a story.

Rubric- Set of general criteria used to evaluate a student's performance in a given outcome area. Rubrics consist of a fixed measurement scale (e.g., 4 - point) and a list of criteria that describe the characteristics of products or performances for reach score point. Rubrics are frequently accompanied by examples (anchors) of products or performances to illustrate the various score points on the scale (Arter & McTighe, 2001).

Running Records- Sitting right next to a student, the teacher listens to the student read a new or familiar text out loud and makes notations for every word, indicating the student’s accurate reading as well as the errors and corrections; mostly used for developing readers in K-2 or with older students learning to read (Pinnell & Fountas, 1996).

Point of View- The observation point form which the author tells the story.

Scaffolding- Temporary support from a teacher, parent, or accomplished peer that enables the learner to succeed.

Science Fiction- A form of fantasy that infers from scientific facts or theories possible cultures, life forms, worlds, or even other universes.

Setting- The time and place in which events occur in a literary work.

Shared Reading- The teacher reads a story or passage while pointing to the words.

Shared Writing- Students and teacher compose a coherent text collaboratively, the teacher doing the writing while scaffolding children's language and ideas; often these texts become shared reading texts as well as published texts for guided and personal reading (Routman, 2003).

Simile- A figure of speech in which a comparison is made between two unlike things, using the words like or as.

Style- The distinctive individual quality that distinguishes the work of one writer from another.

Theme- A big idea or higher order conceptual category that can subsume vast quantities of specific information (see essential questions)