Parents and carers
Primary Literacy Glossary for Parents: Every Term, in Plain English
Primary literacy comes with a vocabulary all of its own: phonemes, fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases, SPaG. This glossary explains the terms in plain English, grouped by topic, with the year group in which children in England usually meet each one.
The year labels follow the national curriculum for England, which sets out exactly which grammar words pupils are taught year by year. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland use their own curricula, so year groups differ there, though most of the terms themselves are the same. Where a term is school shorthand rather than official curriculum language, the entry says so.
Phonics and early reading
These dominate Reception and Key Stage 1, and they are the terms parents meet first.
| Term | What it means | When it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in a word. The word cat has three: c-a-t. | Reception and Year 1 |
| Grapheme | The letter or group of letters that writes a phoneme down. The sound f can be written f, ff or ph. | Reception and Year 1 |
| Digraph | Two letters making one sound, such as sh, ch or ai. | Reception and Year 1 |
| Trigraph | Three letters making one sound, such as igh in night. | Year 1 |
| Split digraph | Two letters making one sound with another letter between them: the a and e in cake work together to say ay. | Year 1 |
| Blending | Pushing sounds together to read a word: c-a-t becomes cat. | Reception |
| Segmenting | Breaking a word into its sounds to spell it: the reverse of blending. | Reception |
| Decoding | Using phonics to work out written words. The other half of reading is understanding them. | Reception onwards |
| CVC word | A consonant-vowel-consonant word such as dog or sun, the first words children sound out. | Reception |
| Common exception words | Words that break the phonics rules children know so far, such as the, said and once. Some schools say tricky words. | Reception to Year 2 |
| High-frequency words | The words that appear most often in children's reading, practised until automatic. | Reception to Year 2 |
| Phonics screening check | A short national check in June of Year 1 in England: children read 40 words, some real and some made up, to a teacher. See our Year 1 phonics screening page. | Year 1 |
| Book band | A colour-coded difficulty system many schools use to match reading books to children. Band colours vary between schemes, so ask the school for its own ladder. | Reception onwards, school shorthand |
Word types
The building blocks. The year shown is when the national curriculum in England first lists the word in its statutory terminology for pupils.
| Term | What it means | First taught |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | A naming word for a person, place or thing: teacher, park, idea. | Year 2 |
| Adjective | A word that describes a noun: the enormous dog. | Year 2 |
| Verb | A doing or being word: runs, thought, is. | Year 2 |
| Adverb | A word that describes a verb, often saying how or when: she sang loudly. | Year 2 |
| Suffix | Letters added to the end of a word that change its job: help becomes helpful. | Year 2 |
| Prefix | Letters added to the front of a word that change its meaning: happy becomes unhappy. | Year 3 |
| Preposition | A word showing where or when something is in relation to something else: under the table, after lunch. | Year 3 |
| Conjunction | A joining word. And, but and or join equal parts, while because, when and although attach a subordinate clause. | Year 3 |
| Word family | Words built from the same root: act, actor, action, active. | Year 3 |
| Determiner | A word that introduces a noun and pins down which one: the, a, this, some, my. | Year 4 |
| Pronoun | A word standing in for a noun so it is not repeated: she, it, they. | Year 4 |
| Possessive pronoun | A pronoun showing ownership: mine, hers, theirs. | Year 4 |
| Modal verb | A verb expressing possibility or obligation: might, should, must, will. | Year 5 |
| Relative pronoun | The word that opens a relative clause: who, which, that. | Year 5 |
| Synonym | A word with a similar meaning to another: big and large. | Year 6 |
| Antonym | A word with the opposite meaning: hot and cold. | Year 6 |
| Homophone | Words that sound the same but are spelt differently: there, their and they're. A favourite in spelling tests from Year 2 on. | Year 2 onwards |
Sentences and grammar
The section with the jargon parents ask about most, fronted adverbials included.
| Term | What it means | First taught |
|---|---|---|
| Statement, question, exclamation, command | The four sentence types: You are here. Are you here? What a day! Come here. | Year 2 |
| Noun phrase | A noun plus the words that go with it: the dog. Expanding it adds detail: the muddy dog with one ear. | Year 2 |
| Expanded noun phrase | A noun phrase carrying extra description. Year 2 uses them to describe, and by Year 6 they pack information in concisely. | Year 2 |
| Clause | A group of words with its own verb. Every sentence has at least one. | Year 3 |
| Main clause | A clause that makes sense on its own: I ate my lunch. | Year 3 |
| Subordinate clause | A clause that leans on a main clause and cannot stand alone: because I was hungry. | Year 3 |
| Direct speech | The exact words someone says, inside inverted commas. | Year 3 |
| Adverbial | A word or phrase acting like an adverb, telling you how, when or where: after the match, we celebrated. | Year 4 |
| Fronted adverbial | An adverbial moved to the front of the sentence, followed by a comma: Later that night, the rain began. A Year 4 favourite. | Year 4 |
| Relative clause | A subordinate clause starting with who, which or that, adding detail about a noun: the boy who lives next door. | Year 5 |
| Cohesion | How a piece of writing hangs together across sentences and paragraphs, using pronouns, adverbials and connecting phrases. | Year 5 |
| Ambiguity | When a sentence could mean two things, usually by accident. Year 5 and 6 work on removing it. | Year 5 |
| Subject and object | The subject does the verb, and the object receives it. In the dog chased the ball, the dog is subject, the ball is object. | Year 6 |
| Active and passive voice | Active: the dog chased the ball. Passive: the ball was chased by the dog. Year 6 children learn to switch between them. | Year 6 |
| Subjunctive | A formal verb form for wishes and demands: if I were you, and the teacher insists that he be on time. Met in Year 6 as a feature of formal writing. | Year 6 |
| Tense | Whether a verb places its action in the past or present. The progressive form shows ongoing action: she was walking. | Year 2 onwards |
| Standard English | The form of English expected in formal writing and speech, taught as one register among the ways people speak, not as the only correct one. | Across the years |
Punctuation
| Term | What it means | First taught |
|---|---|---|
| Full stop, question mark, exclamation mark | The sentence enders. | Year 1 |
| Comma | First met separating items in a list, later marking clauses and fronted adverbials. | Year 2 |
| Apostrophe | Shows missing letters (don't) or ownership (Amir's coat). The two jobs are taught separately, and mixing them up is normal for a while. | Year 2 |
| Inverted commas | The marks around direct speech. Older materials say speech marks, and the curriculum allows both names. | Year 3 |
| Parenthesis, bracket, dash | Ways of dropping extra information into a sentence: brackets, dashes or a pair of commas. | Year 5 |
| Ellipsis | The three dots that mark a trail-off or a gap. | Year 6 |
| Hyphen | Joins words to stop ambiguity: a man-eating shark is not a man eating shark. | Year 6 |
| Colon and semi-colon | A colon introduces what follows. A semi-colon joins two closely related main clauses; this definition uses one to show it. It also separates long list items. | Year 6 |
| Bullet points | Taught in Year 6 for laying out lists consistently. | Year 6 |
Reading comprehension
Once children can decode, schools talk about understanding. These terms fill reading records and parents' evenings from Year 2 onwards.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Fluency | Reading accurately at a comfortable speed with expression, so attention is free for meaning. |
| Retrieval | Finding an answer that is right there in the text: what colour was the door? |
| Inference | Working out what the text implies but does not say: how do we know she was frightened? |
| Prediction | Saying what might happen next, using evidence from the story so far. |
| Summarising | Boiling a passage down to its main ideas. |
| Guided reading | Reading in a small group with a teacher, focused on one skill. School practice rather than a curriculum term. |
| VIPERS | A popular classroom acronym for the reading skills: vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, sequence or summarise. A teaching scheme's shorthand, not official curriculum language. |
Tests and assessment
The terms that appear around Year 2 and Year 6 in particular.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| SATs | National curriculum tests in England at the end of Year 6, covering reading, maths, and grammar, punctuation and spelling. Our free Year 6 SATs revision plan covers preparing without pressure. |
| SPaG or GPS | Spelling, punctuation and grammar. Two names for the same strand of English. The GPS test is part of Year 6 SATs. |
| Expected standard | The benchmark level for the end of a key stage. Test results and teacher assessments say whether a child is working towards it, meeting it, or working at greater depth. |
| Age-related expectations (ARE) | What the curriculum expects of a typical child in that year group. Working at ARE means on track. |
| Teacher assessment | A judgement made by the teacher from classwork rather than a test. Writing at the end of Year 6 is assessed this way. |
| Moderation | Schools and local authorities cross-checking samples of assessed work so judgements mean the same thing everywhere. |
If a report card term is not here and not in the school's own key, ask the class teacher to translate it. Every school uses some vocabulary of its own, and a straight question is the quickest cure.
Where the year labels come from
The grammar years quoted above are not our invention: the national curriculum for England lists, year by year, the exact terminology pupils must be introduced to, in appendix 2 of the English programmes of study. Year 2 brings noun, noun phrase and apostrophe. Year 4 brings determiner, pronoun and adverbial, and Year 6 brings subject, object, active and passive. Schools may meet a term early, but those lists are the statutory floor.
Phonics terms arrive through each school's chosen phonics programme rather than a single national list, which is why Reception parents in different schools hear slightly different words for the same ideas. The ideas themselves, sounds, the letters that spell them, blending and segmenting, are universal.
If your child is past the age where a term was taught and it still causes trouble, that is worth a conversation rather than a worry. Our guide to phonics support beyond Key Stage 1 covers what help looks like for older children, and our reading help guide for Year 2 covers the earlier years.
Frequently asked questions
What is a fronted adverbial?
An adverbial, a word or phrase saying how, when or where, moved to the front of the sentence and usually followed by a comma. Later that night, the rain began. Children in England meet the term in Year 4.
What does SPaG stand for?
Spelling, punctuation and grammar. Some schools say GPS instead, for grammar, punctuation and spelling. Both name the same strand of English, tested in the Year 6 SATs in England.
What is the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme?
A phoneme is a sound you hear, and a grapheme is how that sound is written down. The word ship has three phonemes, and the grapheme sh writes the first one.
Do these year groups apply outside England?
No. The year-by-year terminology lists quoted here are statutory in England only. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland set their own curricula, so the same terms arrive in different years, though most of the vocabulary is shared.
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