“Phonics taught as a supplemental learning aid rather than as an integral part of the program of reading instruction, often in separate workshops during special time periods.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“An illustrative moral or religious story, usually brief and with generalized, simple characters and universal human application; telling or cautionary account.
‘I have never read a story better than Endurance, Alfred Lansing’s account of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica; but no one considers it literature. If Mailer had written it, might we not read the same text as a parable or something or other.’”
Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry, term of art
“An approach to learning based on the principle of ‘learning by doing’ in which new ideas develop. Discovery learning activities are designed so that students discover facts and principles themselves, through personal experience, rather than having them authoritatively explained by a textbook or a teacher. Discovery learning in prized by progressive and constructivist educators. Some of the principles of discovery learning have long been part of the repertoire of traditional teachers as well, especially in science classes, where, for example, students can directly observe the results of experiments. Critics claim that discovery learning is extremely time-consuming, difficult to manage, and inefficient because so much time is wasted waiting for students to ‘discover’ what is already known by their teachers.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Anagram: (Greek ‘writing back or anew’) The letters of a word or phrase are transposed to form a new word. For instance, the word ‘Stanhope’ can be turned into the word ‘phaetons.’ A common feature of crosswords. Samuel Butler’s title Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.'”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“The understanding that words are made of sounds and sounds are written with letters in the right order. Students who understand this can blend sounds associated with letters into words and can separate words into component sounds for spelling and writing.
Students should be assessed to determine if they can hear sounds in spoken language prior to letter-sound instruction.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“The assumption that schools have certain invariable features, such as classrooms, teachers, subjects, textbooks, tests, report cards, rewards and sanctions, a certain architecture, and a certain layout of the classroom. Education historians David Tyack and William Tobin are credited with the phrase and the observation that the grammar of schooling is remarkably resistant to change.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, term of art
“Alliteration: (Latin ‘repeating and playing upon the same letter’) A figure of speech in which consonants, especially at the beginning of words, or stressed syllables, are repeated. It is a very old device indeed in English verse (older than rhyme) and is very common in verse generally. It is used occasionally in prose. In Old English poetry alliteration was a continual and essential part of the metrical scheme and until the late Middle Ages was of was often used thus. However, alliterative verse becomes increasingly rare after the end of the 15th century and alliteration—like assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia—tends to more to be reserved for the achievement of special effect.
There are many classic examples, like Coleridge’s famous description of the sacred river Alph in Kubla Khan:
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Any others less well known, like this from the beginning of Norman MacCaig’s poem Mutual Life:
A wild cat, fur-fire in a bracken brush,
Twitches his club-tail, rounds his amber eyes
At rockabye rabbits humped on the world. The air
Crackles about him. His world is a rabbit’s size.
And this, from the first stanza of R.S. Thomas’s The Welsh Hill Country:
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.
Alliteration is common in nonsense verse:
Be lenient with lobsters, and ever kind to crabs,
And be not disrespectful to cuttle-fish or dabs;
Chase not the Cochin-China, chaff not the ox obese,
And babble not of feather-beds in company with geese
in tongue-twisters:
Betty Botter bought some butter,
But, she said, the butter’s bitter;
If I put it in my batter
It will make my batter bitter,
But a bit of better butter,
That would make my batter better.
in jingles:
Dingle digle doosey,
The cat’s in the well,
The dog’s away to Bellingen
To buy the bairn a bell.
and in patter beloved of drill sergeants and the like:
Now then, you horrible shower of heathens, have I your complete hattention?
Hotherwise I shall have to heave the whole hairy lot of you into the salt box
where you will live on hopeful hallucinations for as long as hit pleases God and
the commanding hofficer”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Copulative: Indicating linking or predication of words, phrases or clauses, e.g., the verb ‘is.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Addendum (noun) Something added or to be added, as a subsequent comment, note, or insertion; appended supplement. Plural: addenda.
‘The public is probably not deceived about the quality of most of these books. If the question of quality is brought up, the answer is likely to be: not, they are not ‘literature.’ But there is an unexpressed addendum: and perhaps they are all the better for not being imaginative, for not being literature—they are not literature, they are reality, and in a time like this what we need is reality in large doses.’ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“A measure of how easy it is to comprehend a text depending on a number of variables. These include vocabulary, sentence complexity, format, writing style, and topic, plus the reading comprehension level, interest, background information, and decoding skills of the reader.
Some methods of predicting the readability of a text are used to gauge whether an individual can successfully read and comprehend a passage. One such method is to read a section of a passage and count the number of words that are unfamiliar to the reader. If, for example, the reader encounters more than three unfamiliar words, the readability may be too difficult.
In educational settings, a text’s readability is often measured in grade level. For example, a history textbook with a readability of 9.3 means an average ninth grade, third month student should be able to read and comprehend it.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
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