Advance organizer: Oral or written statements at the beginning of a lesson intended to orient learners to the content and/or procedures used. These statements facilitate learning and comprehension of new material.

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

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

External controls: With regard to reading comprehension, prompts or instructions given and controlled by the teacher to guide student use of a strategy, as opposed to independent student control of the strategy.

Goal-specific strategies: Individual procedures readers use to process material. Examples include predicting the outcomes, self-questioning, analyzing the text, visual imagery, using graphic organizers, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

Inference: A conclusion arrived at from facts and by reasoning. Example: If you arrived at a gathering of friends and one of them was sitting in front of a decorated cake and blowing out candles, you would make the inference that it was a birthday celebration and the person celebrating the birthday was the one blowing out the candles.

Macrostructure: The overall organizational pattern of a text.

Metacognition: A person's reflection on his or her own thinking processes. By using metacognitive skills, readers are able to reflect on their own reading processes, for example, 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.

Prediction: A learning strategy that involves taking information gained from listening or reading, identifying questions that emerge, and then making an educated guess as to the content and structure that will follow. An important aspect of using prediction is confirming guesses after reading. Prediction can facilitate understanding and remembering.

Prior knowledge activation strategy (PKA): A previewing strategy that teaches students to talk about how an idea they will encounter in the text relates to personal thoughts and/or experiences.

Proficient readers: Individuals who effectively and independently use skills and strategies to construct meaning from print.

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

Schemata: The plural of schema; a network of many schemas; the structures, frames, units, or scripts into which all knowledge is packed and organized.

Self-questioning: Identifying cues from information heard or read that make a learner wonder about who, what, when, where, which and why and ask personalized questions that relate to the information. The learner then reads to find the answers to these questions. Self-questioning can facilitate understanding and remembering. Good readers automatically self-question; weaker readers need to be taught to do this.

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.

Tactic: An approach a teacher uses to help a student learn.