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

Benchmark: With regard to a literacy curriculum, a specific statement of expected or anticipated performance at various developmental levels.

Content literacy: Listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills necessary to learn in each of the academic disciplines.

ESOL teacher: An instructor who specializes in teaching English as a second language.

Early Literacy Project (ELP): A curricular approach designed to enhance student's knowledge of reading and writing and the role of text structure and strategic knowledge in the process.

Explicit: Completely and clearly expressed without ambiguity or vagueness; fully developed. Example: Explicit instructions would leave no doubt on 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 classrooms textbooks are expository - science, social studies, or health, etc.

Fluency: In the area of reading, the skill of reading with accuracy, speed, and ease.

Generalization: The profitable application of learned skills and strategies to new situations and tasks.

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.

Heterogeneous grouping: A way of organizing groups of students for instruction so that each group will have students with varying levels of achievement or ability, different ages, interests, etc.

Homogeneous grouping: A way of organizing groups of students for instruction so that each group will have students with similar levels of achievement or ability, similar ages, similar interests, etc.

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.

Metacognition: A person's reflection on his or her own thinking processes. By using metacognitive skills, readers are able to make judgments about whether or not they understand what they read.

Narrative text: A collection of written words that seeks to entertain, display knowledge or skill, teach, organize, and plan behavior, most frequently involving imaginative stories with a setting, characters, and a plot. Examples of narrative writing: Little Women, A Tale of Two Cities.

Peer-assisted Learning Strategies (PALS): An approach used to strengthen both fluency in word recognition and comprehension in which students engage in partner reading, paragraph shrinking, and prediction relay.

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

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: Instruction during which the teacher provides a student with just enough help to allow him to accomplish a task that he would be unable to accomplish without the help. As instruction continues, the student does more and more on his own until he can successfully accomplish the task without any help.

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.

Speech-language pathologist: A trained professional who facilitates the acquisition of speech and language skills and strategies with students who have impairments in these areas.

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.

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

Systematic instruction: A way of organizing learning experiences so that both the teacher and the student follow and continuously review a dynamic plan related to how new content will be learned and how that new content relates to past and future learning.

Text structure: Characteristics of written material; the ways 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).

Title I teachers: Teachers who typically teach children who are at high risk for learning difficulties. Title I teachers are part of a federally funded education program called Title I that was established to help these students overcome these difficulties.

Word recognition: The ability to identify and read a word and understand its meaning.