4What is vocabulary?
A set of words or phrases. A person has five different vocabularies:
- Listening vocabulary: Consists of the words you understand when listening to other people speak.
- Speaking vocabulary: Consists of words you use when you talk.
- Writing vocabulary: Consists of the words used when writing.
- Sight (reading) vocabulary: Consists of words you can recognize and correctly pronounce.
- Meaning vocabulary: Consists of the words you understand when reading silently.
What is academic language?
The language used in textbooks and tests; it is the language of the classroom.
Technical academic language refers to words related to a specific discipline (also called domain-specific).
Non-technical academic language runs across disciplines and includes such words as theory, hypothesis, analysis, etc.
What is background knowledge?
Refers to what you know about a topic.
Students will not comprehend what they are reading if they lack essential background knowledge.
Background knowledge is the foundation upon which greater knowledge can be built.
What is a morpheme?
The most elemental unit of meaning in a language (some words and all affixes).
What is an affix?
An affix is either a prefix (a morpheme that appears before a root word) or a suffix (a morpheme that appears after a root word).
A free morpheme can be uttered alone with meaning (e.g., test); a bound morpheme are prefixes and suffixes that cannot occur alone as they must be attached to a root word (e.g., un-, -est).
