Affix ✔✔A morpheme or meaningful part of a word attached before or after a root or base word to modify its meaning; a category that includes prefixes and suffixes. Alphabetic Principle ✔✔The use of letters and letter combinations to represent phonemes in an orthography. Automaticity ✔✔Fluent performance without the conscious deployment of attention Base word ✔✔A free morpheme, usually of Anglo-Saxon origin, to which affixes can be added. Blend ✔✔A consonant sequence before or after a vowel within a syllable, such as cl, br, or st; also called "consonant blend." Book talk ✔✔A discussion of one or more books by a teacher, librarian, or student to introduce books and to induce others to read them. Bound morpheme ✔✔A morpheme, usually of Latin origin in English, that cannot stand alone but is used to form a family of words with related meanings. A bound root (such as -fer) has meaning only in combination with a prefix and/or a suffix. Cloze procedure ✔✔Any of several ways of measuring a person's ability to restore omitted portions of an oral or written message by reading its remaining context. Comprehension Monitoring ✔✔The mental act of knowing when one does and does not understand what one is reading.