|Skill|Definition| |---|---| |**Phonological Awareness**|The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sound structures in spoken language — rhymes, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes — without reference to print.| |**Phonemic Awareness**|A subset of phonological awareness focused on individual phonemes. Key skills include blending, segmenting, and manipulating sounds. One of the strongest predictors of early reading success.| |**Phonics**|Understanding of the alphabetic principle — that letters and letter combinations represent predictable sounds. Explicit, systematic phonics instruction is central to the Science of Reading.| |**Fluency**|The ability to read accurately, at an appropriate rate, and with prosody. Fluency bridges decoding and comprehension by freeing cognitive resources for meaning-making.| |**Vocabulary**|Knowledge of word meanings, oral and written. Organized into Tier 1 (everyday words), Tier 2 (academic language), and Tier 3 (domain-specific terms). Strongly correlated with comprehension.| |**Comprehension**|The ultimate goal of reading — constructing meaning from text. Draws on all other skills, background knowledge, inference-making, and text structure awareness.| |**Print Concepts**|Understanding of how print works — directionality, word boundaries, punctuation, and the relationship between spoken and written words. Critical for emergent readers.| |**Background Knowledge**|The world knowledge readers bring to text. Research consistently shows it significantly influences how much readers understand and retain from what they read.|