This limited glossary contains commonly understood working definitions of some terms used in the English curriculum and teacher guidelines.
| digraph | a combination of two letters or characters used to represent a single sound |
| engagement with text | reading, comprehending, reflecting on and responding to a piece of text |
| expository text | text that describes or explains |
| grammar | a systematic description of the generally accepted rules of a language |
| grapho-phonic cues | the information provided in sounds and in combinations of sounds represented by letters and groups of letters that helps to predict words |
| language-experience material | the creation of text by the teacher in collaboration with the pupils in order to facilitate early reading |
| large-format books | books that are produced in a format large enough for collaborative reading with groups |
| literacy | the level of reading and writing ability sufficient for everyday life but not necessarily for completely autonomous activity
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| morpheme | a speech element having a meaning or grammatical function that cannot be subdivided into further such elements |
| narratve text | an account of events, experiences, etc. |
| onset and rime | onset is the part of a syllable that precedes the vowel and rime is the remainder of the syllable |
| phoneme | one of the set of speech sounds in a language that serve to distinguish one word from another—the smallest units of sound in a word
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| phonemic awareness | the knowledge that words are composed of individual speech sounds |
| phonological awareness | a range of skills such as the ability to analyse words into their constituent speech sounds, the ability to combine speech sounds, and the ability to detect rhyme and alliteration |
| representational text | text in the form of diagrams, pictures, graphs, etc. |
| scanning | reading quickly in order to establish the organisation and principal features of a text |
| semantic cues | the contextual information in a text that will help to predict a word or words |
| skimming | reading quickly in order to find out the gist of a text
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| syntax | the totality of facts about the grammatical arrangement of words in a language |
| syntactic cues | the information contained in grammar and language use that facilitates the interpretation of text |
| text | the entirety of a linguistic communication in written or printed form or through sign, gesture or situation |
| writing genres | the various forms appropriate to different types of written communication—story, essay, letter, dialogue, recipe, etc. |