Concepts about the Phonological and Morphological Aspects of English
1. Alphabetic Principle: A principle that suggests letters in the alphabet map to phonemes, the
minimum sound units represented in written language
2. Linguistic Awareness: An understanding of the technical features of language, including the
sound system, the writing system, the rules of spelling, the conventions of written text, as
well as technical terms and labels used to talk and think about reading.
3. Phonemic Awareness: An understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual
sounds (with the smallest one being phoneme), not unlike text is composed of individual
words (with the smallest writing symbol being individual letters). It is a powerful predictor of
children’s later reading achievement.
4. Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear, recognize, and comprehend the sounds in our
language. It involves hearing the sounds of language apart from meaning [sentences can be
segmented into words; words can be segmented into syllables/individual sounds; words can
begin or end with the same sounds; individual sounds of words can be blended together;
individual sounds of words can be manipulated (added, deleted, or substituted)].
5. Concepts about Print: Knowledge that words are represented by print, that letters of the
alphabet are represented in different ways, and that letters can represent multiple sounds or
the same sound represented by different letters.
6. Consonants: Speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed (cf. IPA chart)
7. Vowels: Speech sound made with vibration of the vocal cords but without audible friction
(cf. IPA chart)
8. Onsets: The initial part of a word (a consonant, consonant blend, or diagraph) that precedes
the vowel, e.g. take, great, think
9. Rimes: The part of a word that includes the vowel and any consonants that follow, e.g., my,
his, theirs, literacy
10. Syllables: A syllable is vowel or a cluster of sounds containing a vowel and pronounced as a
unit, e.g., I, be, car, make, beau~ty, beau~ti~ful, beau~ti~ful~ly
11. Phonics: Method of teaching reading based on sounds
12. Orthography refers to all aspects of writing, including spelling, using punctuation marks,
and understanding other language conventions (e.g., using upper case for the first letter in the
first word of a sentence, indenting the first sentence of a paragraph, or keeping a letter space
between words, etc.).
13. Morpheme means the smallest meaningful part within words. There are free morphemes
(those that can be used independently) and bound morphemes (those that can only be used as
affixes to others).
14. Morphology is the study of the structure and meaning of words.
15. Parts of Speech mean the major categories/classifications of words based on their
grammatical and semantic function.