Advance organizer: Oral or written statements at the beginning of a lesson intended to facilitate learning and comprehension of new material.

Background knowledge: A personal reservoir of information on a variety of topics; information retained in one's long-term memory; prior knowledge.

Cognition: The process of knowing by thinking, comprehending, analyzing, or evaluation. Examples: Students use the cognitive process to be able to understand or gain meaning from spoken or written material by reasoning, making inferences, seeing relationships, etc.

Comprehension instruction: A process of teaching that enables students to better understand what they are being taught.

Content acquisition: The process of gaining information that is either being taught or experienced.

Corrective feedback: Information provided by the teacher to the student about specific aspects of performance, including the nature of errors or difficulties encountered as well as suggested actions for repair.

Debugging strategy: A plan or method of repairing reading problems by reworking the strategy being used or finding a new strategy to use.

Decode: To relate a sequence of letters in print to their corresponding sounds, allowing the reader to translate the sequence into a word.

Direct instruction: A specific way of teaching in which instructional goals and content are made obvious to the students.

Efficacious: Able to produce a preferred outcome or result.

Expository text: A collection of written words that gives information or explains something. Most classroom textbooks are expository - science, social studies, health, etc.

Goal-specific strategies: Procedures readers use to process specific material. Examples include predicting the outcomes, self-questioning, analyzing the text, visual imagery, and using graphic organizers.

Graphic organizer: An organized, visual representation of information used to facilitate comprehension and remembering; a visual depiction.

Higher-order sequencing strategies: Strategies that help the user put a strategic package together.

Incongruous: Being inconsistent or not agreeing; incompatible.

Informative feedback: Information provided by the teacher to the student about the nature of his/her performance, e.g., what was correct and incorrect.

Intensive instruction: A way of directing student attention in which sufficient time is spent in teacher-guided interactive learning activities and a high degree of goal-directed student engagement leads to student mastery and generalization.

Language structure: The pattern or organization of letters in words, words in sentences, sentences in paragraphs, and paragraphs in whole texts, often specific to a particular language. Knowledge of language structures plays a key role in the comprehension of words, sentences, and texts.

Linguistic skills: Abilities related to using the subsystems of language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) for communication.

Metacognitive components: The elements that make up the way people reflect on their own thought processes. The three major components are metacognitive knowledge, self-regulation, and motivation.

Metacognitive knowledge: The knowledge of how to monitor, adjust, and direct one's own mental processes for a desired result. In reading, knowledge of how to monitor, adjust, and direct one's reading strategies to ensure reading comprehension.

Methodology: A range or collection of procedures and techniques.

Mnemonic device: Creative device used to assist or intended to assist memory. Examples : HOMES gives us the beginning letters of the Great Lakes, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.

Monitoring strategies: In the context of reading, procedures used by readers to assess if they understand what they are reading and to decide if they should continue, discontinue, or modify a strategy being used. Examples of monitoring strategies are self-questioning, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Monitoring strategies can be used with spoken language as well as with written language.

Morphological skills: Abilities that enable readers to deal with formation of words and the sounds that are used to form them. The meaning of a word changes when different parts are added or removed. For example, the meaning of 'cat' changes when a 's' is added and the word becomes 'cats'.

Motivation: A plan or state of mind that enables one to move toward a desirable goal.

Narrative text: A collection of written words that tells a story and has a setting, characters, and a plot. Examples of narrative writing: Little Women, A Tale of Two Cities.

Post organizer: Short statement or statements at the end of a lesson intended to facilitate learning and retention of instructional material. The statements might summarize what has been learned, tell how the learning can be used, what the next steps will be, etc.

Proficient readers: Individuals who effectively and independently use skills and strategies to construct meaning from print.

Reading comprehension: The process or result of gaining intended and personal meaning from written material.

Repertoire: All of one's experiences or one's expertise in a particular area.

Responsive instruction: A way of making teaching decisions in which a student's reaction to instruction directly shapes how future instruction is provided.

Scaffolded instruction: An instructional strategy whereby the teacher provides just enough assistance (explanation, instruction, modeling, guided practice, feedback, etc.) to students to allow them to do a task that they would not be able to do without their assistance. The assistance is gradually withdrawn until the student is able to do the task on his own.

Scaffolding: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher provides to students, early in the learning process, a significant amount of support in the form of modeling, prompts, direct explanations, and targeted questions. Instruction during this phase is primarily teacher-guided. Then, as students begin to acquire mastery of the targeted objectives, direct teacher supports are reduced and the major responsibility for learning is transferred to the student. When students assume more responsibility, it is referred to as student-guided learning.

Self-efficacy: With reference to reading, the belief in one's own competency to perform specific reading tasks.

Self-knowledge: In the context of reading, an awareness and knowledge of what one needs to do to understand and retain information.

Self-questioning: Identifying cues from information heard or read that make a learner wonder about who, what, when, where, which, why, and how and ask personalized questions that relate to the information. The learner then reads to find the answers to these questions. Self-questioning can facilitate understanding and remembering. Good readers automatically self-question; weaker readers need to be taught to do this.

Self-regulation: The process of analyzing a reading task in order to select an approach, then monitoring the course of reading, and, if necessary, adjusting or revising the strategic approach.

Semantic skills: Those skills that enable the reader to understand the meaning in language.

Semantic web: A visual presentation of significantly related words.

Strategic instruction: An educational approach aimed at providing rules or guidelines to help individuals approach tasks more effectively, efficiently, and independently.

Strategy: An individual's approach to a task; how a person thinks and acts when planning, executing, and evaluating the performance of a task and its outcomes.

Strategy acquisition: A method where one acquires a desired approach to a task. This includes how the person thinks and acts when planning, executing and evaluating the performance of the task and its outcomes.

Strategy-oriented approach: A way of teaching where strategies, or an individual's approach to a task, are taught to the students. Strategic instruction is a strategy-oriented approach to teaching.

Summarizing: Concisely synthesizing the essential ideas of a text or passage.

Syntactical skill: The ability to understand and to use the order or pattern of words within phrases, clauses, and sentences whereby the relations among the words are indicated. For example, in English, verbs usually follow nouns, and adjectives usually precede nouns.

Synthesize: To integrate, or bring together, different pieces that, once joined, create a whole.

Systematic instruction: Instruction that is carefully organized, connected to past and future learning, scaffolded so that students need decreasing support, and informative so that students become self-directd learners.

Technical text: Written material that has a distinctive vocabulary with specialized meanings and is related to a specific content field or discipline.

Text structure: The organizational framework of written material; the way ideas in a text are organized. Examples of some common patterns of expository text structure include description, sequence, cause/effect, and compare/contrast. Each structure has elements that are specific to it. For example, a narrative structure would include characters, a setting, a plot, a theme, etc.

Visual imagery strategy: A strategic approach to aid comprehension and retention of information during which individuals create detailed pictures in their minds and link the images to the content being learned.