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

Cognitive: Involving the process of knowing by thinking, comprehending, analyzing or evaluation. Example: 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.

Decoding: The ability relating a sequence of letters in print to their corresponding sounds, allowing the reader to translate the sequence into a word.

Explicit: Completely and clearly expressed without ambiguity or vagueness; fully developed. Example: Explicit instructions would leave no doubt in your mind about what you were to do. Every part would be "spelled out."

Expository text: A collection of written words that gives information, explains something, or seeks to persuade. 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, using graphic organizers, paraphrasing and summarizing.

Metacognition: A person's reflection on his or her own thinking processes. By using metacognitive skills, readers are able to reflect on their own reading processes; for example, whether or not they understand what they read.

POSSE: An approach to reading comprehension that combines text structure mapping and reciprocal teaching. The steps include Predicting, Organizing, Searching, Summarizing and Evaluating.

Paraphrasing: A process that involves taking information from reading or listening and rephrasing the information in one's own words in a way that personalizes the information. This can facilitate one's ability to understand and remember the information.

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.

Reciprocal teaching: An approach to reading comprehension which combines students' background knowledge, knowledge of text structures, and reading strategies with self-regulation in a socially interactive procedure.

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-questioning: Identifying cues from information heard or read that make a learner wonder about who, what, when, where, which and why 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: With regard to reading, the action taken by readers to help themselves take control and read more effectively by trying to understand the purpose for reading, selecting an approach, monitoring their comprehension, and, if necessary, adjusting or revising the strategic approach.

Semantic map: A graphic structure that is focused on a single, central idea or concept from which all information radiates outward.

Strategy: A method or plan used to complete a task efficiently, effectively, and independently; 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.

Summarization: The process of concisely restating the essential ideas of a text or passage, and synthesizing the ideas into an overarching, or superordinate, idea.

Text structure: Characteristics of written material; the way ideas in a text are constructed and organized. Includes overall framework or macrostructure as well as the structure of smaller segments of text related to the macrostructure (e.g., visual cues, signal words, cohesive devices and sentence level factors).

Transactional Strategies Instruction: A multifaceted and integrated approach to teaching strategic reading in which the reader is actively constructing meaning in collaboration with others and learning when, where, and how to use strategies. The strategies used in this approach are (1) predicting, (2) verifying, (3) visualizing, (4) making connections, (5) monitoring and (6) fix-it strategies.

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