DIST GLOSSARY

Curriculum/educational language that features a specific vocabulary and way of interacting with text that differs from standard, everyday language.

A process by which a series of unrelated pieces of information can become linked into a meaningful single unit or whole.

Cognition is the umbrella term for the faculties we possess that track happenings in the world and register our feelings, thoughts and motivations.  These cognitive processes collectively have to determine the significance of all these external and internal sources of information and guide us to make appropriate and effective responses.  Examples of cognitive processes include: "attention, perception, memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning and thinking." (Eysenck & Keane, p.1, 2005).

The pattern of cognitive processes that affect how learners interact and perform in learning situations.

Refers to a set of processes that jointly fixes a memory trace (fact, happening, etc) after it has been acquired.

A large collection of English Language texts (spoken and written words) organised along domain of use, text purpose and frequency of linguistic units/features/characteristics within a Standard Language, available online for academic enquiry.  These large word banks available for search and research into language use.  Examples are British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English.

"...a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance.  Significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were 1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance." (Erricson, 2008, p.991).

A written or printed letter (or cluster of letters) that corresponds with a specific phoneme.  Examples: <ch>, <t>, <x> etc.

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

The study of the meaning and structure units in a language.