Understanding the Language of Literacy and Reading - Preparing for a Parent-Teacher Conference
- bday569
- Apr 27
- 5 min read
If you’ve ever sat in a parent-teacher conference and nodded along while thinking, “I have no idea what she just said,” you are not alone. Education comes with its own language. And reading education? It has a whole dialect (a variation of a language, usually by region).
As the Science of Reading has gained more attention in recent years, you’re probably hearing terms like “phonemic awareness,” “graphemes,” and “decodable text” more and more. Knowing what these words mean doesn’t just help you follow along. It helps you be a more informed advocate for your child.
I’ve pulled together the terms I think you are most likely to hear. I try to not use them myself and, personally, I don’t think the vocabulary is the important part. The ideas are what is important as these are the foundations of literacy education.
The Building Blocks of Sound
Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up a word. “Cat” has three: /c/, /a/, /t/. They’re the smallest units of sound in spoken language, and they’re the foundation of everything else.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with those sounds. It’s purely about listening — no letters required. A child with strong phonemic awareness can tell you that “cat” and “cap” start with the same sound, or that if you take the /c/ away from “cat,” you’re left with “at.” This skill is one of the strongest early predictors of reading success.
Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and work with the sounds in spoken words. This includes being able to rhyme, clap out syllables, or recognize that "cat" and "cap" start with the same sound.
Phonics is where the sounds meet the letters. It’s the process of learning that the letter “b” makes the /b/ sound and applying that knowledge to read and spell words.
Letters, Sounds, and the Way They Work Together
The alphabetic principle is the big idea behind phonics and the foundation of reading. It is understanding that letters represent sounds, and that those sounds combine to form words. Once a child truly grasps this, reading begins to unlock.
A grapheme is a letter or group of letters that represents a single sound. In English, a grapheme can be one letter (like “e”), two letters (like “ei”), three letters (like “igh”), or even four (like “eigh”). English spelling is complicated, and graphemes are a big part of why.
Digraphs are a specific type of grapheme. They are two letters (“di” means two) that combine to make one sound. The /sh/ in “ship,” the /ch/ in “chair,” the /th/ in “that.”
A consonant blend is different from a grapheme because, although it is a group of letter (in this case, consonants), they don’t make one cohesive sound as they do in a grapheme. Instead, you can still hear each individual sound. Think of the “bl” in “black” or the “st” in “stop.” Teaching children to hear these individual sounds is an important part of the phonics process.
Reading and Writing are Literacy
Decoding is just the technical term for reading; specifically, the process of translating printed letters into sounds and words.
Encoding, is writing; translating sounds back into letters.
Blending is the act of pushing individual sounds together to form a word such as combining /m/, /a/, and /p/ to say “map.”
Chunking is a related skill for longer words, where a reader breaks the word into manageable pieces such as reading “yes-ter-day” one chunk at a time rather than staring at it whole.
Syllable types are the six patterns that govern how vowels behave in English words. Some people use the acronym CLOVER to keep them straight. You don’t really need to do this, but it is good to know the types as this is how they are being taught to your child. It’s also important to know that there are always words that break these rules.
Closed: cat, cobweb
Consonant-le: candle, juggle (second syllable)
Open: he, silo
Vowel pairs (teams): count, rain
Silent ‘e’ or vowel-consonant-e (VCE): like, milestone
R-controlled (vowel-R): star, corner
Understanding What You Read
Comprehension is understanding what you read. This is the goal of reading – not just being able to say the words, but being able to answer questions about them and use the information. It’s the whole point of reading.
Background knowledge is what a child already knows about a topic before they begin reading. It is one of the biggest contributors to reading comprehension. A child who knows something about the ocean is going to comprehend a passage about sea turtles far better than a child who doesn’t. Building background knowledge through conversation, nonfiction reading, and real-world experience is one of the most underrated things a parent can do.
Close reading takes comprehension a step further. It means reading something slowly and carefully to understand not just what it says, but what it truly means. It’s a skill that develops over time.
A Few More You’ll Hear
Sight words (also called high-frequency words) are words a reader recognizes automatically without sounding them out. Some of these are rule-breakers — words that don’t follow normal phonics patterns and simply have to be memorized. These are sometimes called heart words, because you just have to know them by heart.
Decodable texts are books designed so that most of the words use sounds and letter patterns a child has already been taught. They’re not literary masterpieces, but they’re incredibly valuable for building confidence and reinforcing skills.
Concepts of print refers to the basic mechanics of how a page works: that we read left to right and top to bottom, that spaces separate words, that a period means stop. These seem obvious to us, but children have to learn them.
Invented spelling is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when a child spells a word the way it sounds to them, like writing “serkus” for “circus.” Far from being a problem, invented spelling is actually a wonderful window into what a child understands about how our sound system works.
This is just a starting point. There’s a whole other layer of vocabulary around literacy and reading evaluations, assessments, and IEPs that I will discuss in a future post. For now, I hope this gives you a foundation to stand on the next time you’re in a meeting with your child’s teacher. You belong in that conversation.
If you’re trying to make sense of what your child’s teacher is telling you or you’re just not sure where your child stands, I’d love to help. Reach out to schedule a free call. We’ll talk it through together.
Want even more reading terminology? Reading Rockets has a wonderful extended glossary.
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