fable
a short tale in prose or verse that teaches a moral, usually with animals and inanimate objects as characters.

fairytale
a folk story about real-life problems, usually with imaginary characters and magical events.

fantasy
a highly imaginative story about characters, places, and events that, while sometimes believable, do not exist.

farce
1. a light humorous play emphasizing improbable situations rather than characterization, as Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear.
2. humor of the type found in such plays.

feminist criticism
literary criticism that opposes male writing and thinking in order to create a female consciousness. Note: Feminist criticism frees women from Western paternalism by expanding the human experience, by recovering works of women writers often ignored, and by encouraging new literature by women.

fiction
imaginative narrative in any form of presentation designed to entertain, as distinguished from that which is designed primarily to explain, argue, or merely describe; specifically, a type of literature, especially prose, as novels and short stories, but also including plays and narrative poetry.

figurative language
language enriched by word images and figures of speech.

first person
a passage written from the point of view of the main character.

flexible grouping
allowing students to work in differently mixed groups depending on the goal of the learning task at hand. Note: Flexible grouping is sometimes used in classes in which students are ordinarily organized on the basis of ability.

fluency
1. the clear, easy, written or spoken expression of ideas.
2. freedom from word-identification problems that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading; automaticity.

folklore
the traditions and beliefs of a people that have been passed down from generation to generation orally or as written tales. Note: To about 1850, folklore was called popular antiquities.

folktale
a narrative form, as an epic, legend, myth, fable, etc., that is or had been retold within culture for generations and is well known through repeated storytelling, as an Anansi tale.

foot
a unit of rhythm in verse, usually with one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables; metrical unit.

foreshadowing
the technique of giving clues to coming events in a narrative. v. foreshadow.

free morpheme
a morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word, as cat. Cp. bound morpheme.

free recall
a memory task in which a subject is given a series of items and is later asked to recall them in any order.

free verse
verse with an irregular metrical pattern and line length that originated in 19th-century France as a movement to free poetry from the strict metrical rules of that time; vers libre.

freewriting
writing that is unstructured in form, style, content, and purpose. Note: Like brainstorming, freewriting as a teaching technique is designed to help the student-writer find a personal voice through uninhibited expression. Teachers often find that freewriting is helpful for the student who says, "I can't think of anything to write about."

frustration reading level
a readability or grade level of material that is too difficult to be read successfully by a student, even with normal classroom instruction and support. Note: Although suggested criteria for determining a student's frustration reading level vary, less than 90 percent accuracy in word identification and less than 50 percent comprehension are often used as standards.

functional literacy
a level of reading and writing sufficient for everyday life but not for completely autonomous activity.

functional print
environmental print specifically intended to convey information, as words on a cereal box.

function word
a word such as a conjunction, preposition, or article whose primary purpose is to show grammatical relationships in and between sentences; closed-class word; functor; empty word.

genre
a category used to classify literary works, usually by form, technique, or content. Note: Classic literary genres are tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, and pastoral. "Today, the novel, essay, short story, television play, and motion picture scenario are also considered genres" (Holman & Harmon, 1992).

Gillingham method
a synthetic phonics system reinforced by intensive writing and spelling practice. Also Orton-Gillingham method.

gloss
a brief explanation of printed text, usually in the margin or in an appendix but sometimes between the lines, as in an interlinear gloss.

Gothic novel
1. a style of novel, especially popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, characterized by mysterious settings, an atmosphere of gloom and terror, supernatural happenings, and often violence and horror, as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
2. a modern story written in that style.

graded word list
a list of words ranked by grade level, reader level, or other level of difficulty or complexity, often used to assess competence in word identification, word-meaning knowledge, and spelling.

grapheme
a written or printed representation of a phoneme, as b for /b/ and oy for /oi/ in boy. Note: In English, a grapheme may be a single letter or a group of letters. It includes all the ways in which the phoneme may be written or printed.

grapheme-phoneme
the relationship between a grapheme and the phoneme(s) it

correspondence
represents; letter-sound correspondence, as c representing /k/ in cat and /s/ in cent. Note: Technically, grapheme- phoneme correspondence refers to how letters correspond to sounds, not vice versa. Phonics as a teaching device in reading instruction concerns grapheme-phoneme correspondences‹that is, how to pronounce words seen in print. Cp. phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

graphophonic
referring to the sound relationships between the orthography and phonology of a language.

guided reading
reading instruction in which the teacher provides the structure and purpose for reading and for responding to the material read. Note: Most basal reading programs have guided reading lessons. See also directed reading activity.

haiku
1. a major type of Japanese poetry; specifically, a form of verse written in seventeen syllables with three lines of five, seven and five syllables, respectively, to express a single thought and intended to call forth a specific response.
2. a poem written in this manner.

hard c
in phonics, the /k/ sound represented by the letter c in cake, ascot. Cp. soft c.

hard g
the /g/ sound represented by the letter g in gate, again. Cp. soft g.

heroic couplet
a pair of lines of iambic pentameter poetry, as "What dire offense from amorous causes springs! / What mighty contests rise from trivial things!" (Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock).

heterogeneous grouping
the organization for instruction of students of differing levels of intelligence or achievement in one or more skills or subjects, either within or across classes. Cp. ability grouping; homogenous grouping.

high-frequency word
a word that appears many more times than most other words in spoken or written language. Note: Basic word lists generally provide words ranked in order of their frequency of occurrence as calculated from a sample of written or spoken text suitable for the level of intended use.

high interest-low vocabulary
referring to stories of demonstrated appeal to most readers that are written at low levels of textual difficulty for use by poorer readers. Also: hi(gh)-lo(w).

historical fiction
a long narrative of past events and characters, partly historical but largely imaginative, as The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (père).

holistic
1. referring to a psychological premise that the whole is different from and greater than its parts; gestalt.
2. in word recognition, referring to the recognition of a word as a single unit apart from its letter components. n. holism.

holistic approach
teaching in which subject matter is kept intact rather than separated into parts for instructional purposes, as the integration of speaking, listening, writing, and reading into a unified approach to literacy instruction.

homogenous grouping
the placement of students across or within classes according to one or more selected criteria, as age, ability, achievement, interests, etc. Cp. heterogeneous grouping.

homograph
a word with the same spelling as another word, whether or not pronounced alike, as pen (a writing instrument) vs. pen (an enclosure), or bow (and arrow) vs. bow (of a ship). Cp. homophone.

homonym
1. a word with different origin and meaning but the same oral or written form as one or more other words, as bear (an animal) vs. bear (to support) vs. bare (exposed), or row (to propel a boat) vs. row (a line) vs. row (a brawl). Note: In this sense, homonym includes homophones and homographs. The different spellings or pronunciations of homonyms are due to differing origins of these words.
2. in popular usage, a word with the same pronunciation and spelling as another word but different in meaning, as bay (a body of water) vs. bay (part of a window).

homophone
1. a word with different origin and meaning but the same pronunciation as another word, whether or not spelled alike, as hare and hair or scale (of a fish) and scale (a ladder).
2. in popular usage, two or more different graphemes that represent the same sound, as /k/ spelled c in candy, k in king, ch in school. Cp. homograph.

hybrid word
a word formed from morphemes derived from more than one language, as television from (Gr.) tele- + (Lat.) -vision.

hyperbole
an intentionally exaggerated figure of speech, as I have told you a million times.

idiom
an expression that does not mean what it literally says, as to have the upper hand has nothing to do with hands. Note: Idioms are peculiar to a given language and usually cannot be translated literally. For this reason, languages especially rich in idioms, as English, French, German, and Russian, are difficult to translate. adj. idiomatic.

idyll
1. a short poem or prose narrative describing simple life and times in a romantic and sometimes pastoral way, as Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. See also pastoral.
2. a long narrative poem idealized in subject, tone, and mood, as Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Also idyl. adj. idyllic.

illocutionary act
a speech act in which what is said performs a function, as the act of making a promise when one says, "I promise..." Cp. locutionary act; perlocutionary act.

immersion
in the teaching of foreign languages, the practice of communicating only in the language being taught.

improvisational drama
informal classroom drama; "a type of oral imaginative expression through which students work together in a fictive enterprise" (Wagner, 1991).

inclusion
the placement of students of all abilities in a classroom. Note: The aim of inclusion is to educate all handicapped children, no matter how severe their disabilities, in ordinary classrooms, usually a goal to be attained rather than a widely accepted practice. Cp. mainstreaming.

incremental repetition
the repeating, with variation, of a refrain or other part of a poem, especially in popular ballads, as O what will you leave to your father dear? / The silver-shod steed that brought me here. / What will you leave to your mother dear? / My velvet pail and my silken gear. Note: In this ballad of unknown authorship, the incremental repetition refers to the way in which successive dialogue patterns reflect earlier ones. Cp. parallel repetition.

independent reading level
the readability or grade level of material that is easy for a student to read with few word-identification problems and high comprehension. Note: Although suggested criteria vary, better than 99 percent word-identification accuracy and better than 90 percent comprehension are often used as standards in judging if a reader is reading at this level. See also frustration reading level; informal reading inventory; instructional reading level.

individualized reading
an approach to reading instruction, developed in the 1950s as an alternative to basal reading programs, that emphasizes student selection of reading materials (largely trade books) and self-pacing in reading, with the teacher adjusting instruction to student needs in small group work and in individual conferences.

inductive method
a teaching-learning method in which specific examples are first examined to identify a common characteristic and then used to develop a generalization or rule. Note: A phonics approach that gives many examples of a phonic pattern before arriving at the phonic generalization is an inductive method. Cp. deductive method.

informal reading inventory (IRI)
the use of a graded series of passages of increasing difficulty to determine students' strengths, weaknesses, and strategies in word identification and comprehension.

initial blend
1. the joining of two or more consonant sounds, represented by letters, that begin a word without losing the identity of the sounds, as /bl/ in black, /skr/ in scramble.
2. the joining of the first consonant and vowel sounds in a word, as /b/ and /a/ in baby. Note: This process is regarded by some to be a crucial step in learning phonics.

inner speech
according to Vygotsky, the "mental shorthand" seen in childhood that is imitative in nature and represents "thinking without words" (cf. Seifert & Hoffman, 1991).

insertion
the addition of one or more words in the oral reading of text; one of several types of oral reading errors commonly recorded in testing oral reading. See also mispronunciation; substitution.

instructional reading level
the reading ability or grade level of material that is challenging, but not frustrating for the student to read successfully with normal classroom instruction and support. Note: Although suggested criteria vary, better than 95 percent word-identification accuracy and better than 75 percent comprehension are often used as standards in judging whether a student is reading at this level. See also frustration reading level; independent reading level; informal reading inventory.

integrated text
text that is especially coherent because of the author's careful cohesion of grammatical structure and meaning.

interest inventory
an informal list of options to which an individual responds, used to explore reading preferences, work and play interests, radio and TV habits, etc.

internal rhyme
a rhyme that occurs within a line of verse, as dreary and weary in "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" (Edgar Allen Poe, "The Raven").

International Literacy Day
September 8, the day designated since 1990 by the United Nations to recognize the worldwide importance of literacy.

interrogative word
a word that marks a clause or sentence as a question.

intertextuality
the construct that "meaning derives from readers' transaction(s) with the text in which [they] apply their knowledge of literary and social convention to that text" (Beach et al., 1994).

intonation
the distinctive patterns of pitch that contribute to the meanings of spoken phrases and sentences, as between commands and questions such as "Go now!" and "Go now?"; intonation pattern. See also pitch.

intrinsic phonics
phonics instruction and materials that form an integral part of a reading instruction program. Cp. extrinsic phonics.

invented spelling
the result of an attempt to spell a word whose spelling is not already known, based on a writer's knowledge of the spelling system and how it works. Note: Invented spellings, beginning with the pioneer work of Read (1971), are used both to study young writers' emerging awareness of conventional spelling patterns and as an instructional strategy in beginning writing as the child moves toward controlled use of conventional spelling of words.

irony
1. a figure of speech in which the literal meaning of the words is the opposite of their intended meaning, as in I could care less. See also sarcasm; satire.
2. a literary technique for implying, through plot or character, that the actual situation is quite different from that presented. adj. ironic.

journal
1. a typed or written record usually kept daily.
2. a chronological relating of events.
3. a periodical published by a learned society, association, institution, etc.
4. a newspaper, especially a daily one.
5. a collection of student writing in response to reading.

juvenile book
a book written for children or adolescents. See also young adult literature.

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