Because you talk like a pirate?
“Ersatz,” really? I would have counted that as a fully-assimilated English word.
You also just taught me that ‘stupider’ is a word. :eek:
I talk with* distinction*. We had to pronounce things certain ways in grammar school…plus I was terribly afraid I’d slip into my mother’s Wisconsinite (is that correct?) accent.
I didn’t use slang or contractions until high school.
But A E I O U is ineffective? 
:smack: (Took me a while.)
You’re not alone in that. The sound of “eye”, identical to the “long i” sound, begins with the articulation of a as in man and ends with the articulation of i as in mint. Many persons pronounce the first person singular pronoun as an entirely different vowel. But “standard” American pronunciation (read: what you’ll see in dictionaries like Merriam-Webster & American Heritage) has I prnounced as the long I.
Quoth guizot:
Indeed. I hang out with a lot of foreigners, and most of them have trouble with English vowels. Most other languages only have five or ten vowels, but English has something like 19 of them.
Phonology is not my thing. For one, I’m partially deaf. Two, it’s just not my interest. I care more about second language acquisition and linguistic relativity. Three, I apparently hear (or mis hear) things that others don’t. And no, I do not talk like a pirate.
My son’s school uses F.A.S.T. It’s a little bit of everything. They play with letters on the board, do grouping sounds, and books like “The dog and the frog sat on a log.” That same book is used twice a week. Once during reading time (Thursdays) and the other for homework Thursday nights. When he does it for homework, he has it memorized…and he looks at the pictures for clues.
They have worksheets where you make a little “book” and fill in the “sound” that’s missing (the letter) and then circle a letter/letters in a word search as many time as you find it.
They have homework where you sort pictures based on sounds. The sound is at the top and you place all the pictures underneath (dog, frog, hog, log). That’s good if you know what the pictures are, what with synonyms or whatever.
They used to send home paper with sounds or letters that they had to write in a line…but not anymore. Oh, they also send home a list of sight words to practice at home…in flash card form…I had sight words, too, but I also had a spelling list (which I know isn’t the trend right now) and all of my words were put into context.
+10 other methods/tools that I don’t understand.
Sounds like a fucking headache to me. I don’t care much for Crayola explosion, but I’m also the type who likes lectures and hates group projects.
His growth since August in reading? Minimal. Yet he’s still at “kindergarten” stage, so he’s “normal” by shitty CO standards.
They do ‘phonics’ 15 mins a day (and reading groups 2x a week with ‘dog and log’ type books) and ‘free writing’ a few times a week. They’re just encouraged to figure it out on their own when it comes to spelling and word order. I guess that’s okay, but again, not an expert in this area. I had no idea what his ‘stories’ said most of the time. Guess what? Neither did he.
Of course they do reading, writing, and a little Hebrew all day because that’s the nature of school, but the actual practice is minimal. And confusing (to me).
They’ve kind of thrown a bunch of different things at the kids…they get homework but there’s no continuity…no regimen…just…‘stuff related to reading’. I think this works for certain kids, but not mine.
So perhaps I am old-fashioned, or out of touch, or I don’t know anything about reading, but I threw up my hands at what they were doing and did my own thing at home. You know. The way I learned it. Cause I was reading at three and Judah is six and is not getting whatever it is they are doing. By this time, I had requested he be put on their watch list and tested twice before the year was out and again in the beginning of next year. If he’s not progressing enough, then he can get an eval for an LD.
He started speaking late and does that common “write upside down, backward, inside out and all over the page” stuff. You do not write words in a circle. You write them on a line. In a certain direction. He’d read a word on one page, flip the page, and not know the word or be able to sound it out again. He’s constantly guessing. His name is spelled wrong a lot. (It’s not that hard: J-U-D-A-H) Yeah, he’s six, but just in case…
Sixth months into the school year and he didn’t know, um, typical ‘vowels’. A E I O U. That was my first official ‘f that methodology’ attitude. Up until then, I figured they were the professionals in the private school. I taught ESL to high schoolers. I’m a licensed Social Studies teacher. What do I know?
I didn’t teach him all of the vowel rules. I just made sure he knew these letters were set apart. He knew his alphabet and the ‘sounds’ they make (usually, but it’s common for him to mix up certain sounds at six).
But when we teach kids letters, we say, “J says juh” like “jar”. No. I guess that’s partially my fault, since every parent does that in pre-reading…but his teachers reinforced it.
“Jar” is not 'juh uh ar". It’s jär. Teaching kinds to blend like that is silly imho. Or maybe it just isn’t his way of learning. Whatever. It would take him 10 seconds to sound out jar and another 10 to figure out what the hell he just said.
Judah is good with math. He knows that 5 can be 2+3 or 1/2 of 10. It can be five years of age, five minutes, five cookies. Five is less than six and greater than two. Zero is a number and it’s not a number. 50 is fifty, not five plus zero. Five sets of ten make fifty. He likes to build things, take them apart, and wonder why the planets don’t fall down. Judah was so desperate to learn how to read, but couldn’t figure out the ‘code’…
So I decided to teach him at home doing it ‘my way’. He improved a little. Then I decided to throw in reading Hebrew. Every day, weekends and holidays included, he has two reading lessons. They do the Hebrew letters and sounds in school but no vowels or reading yet. I figured since I had the materials and I believe in bilingual ed, why not? Biblical Hebrew (or what we know as the most modern Biblical Hebrew - the stuff at synagogue) has vowel characters. Some extra rules, sure, but not like English. Sounds are the sounds. Anything that deviates (shin vs sin) is notated. Its phonetic.
So if he sees שׁ, he knows it’s “Shin” or “Shin Dot”. The dot on the right indicates the “sh” sound. The dot on the left, שׂ, is the “s” sound like ‘set’. If he sees שַׁ , then he sees “Shin Dot+Patah” [the ‘vowel’ like ‘a’ in father], and automatically says “sha”. That’s it. Not sh…ah…oh, it’s sha! Just sha.
Sin Dot is not ‘suh’ or ‘ess’. It’s [s]. At first, he would say “ssss” or “suh”. I corrected him. A lot. Then he got it.
s = שׂ
sh = שׁ
sha =שַׁ
If I wrote, “Shabbat” in English, he’d probably say, “suh…huh – no, wait, sh - …ah…greedy b, buh…ah…tuh.” :dubious: And then he’d try to guess the word. Estimated time it takes for him to figure out the word: 30 seconds.
When he sounds out Biblical Hebrew, he does it in syllables. (Makes sense if vowels are usually under the character). Sha+ba-t. שַׁבָּת On day 3 of Hebrew reading, mastered that one in seven seconds (he’s asking to be timed) and he’s been exposed to the English alphabet since birth. He started to learn his Hebrew letters this year and they only do the one character every week thing…hmmm…they may not even be to the end yet.
When he sees an end sound, like final mem or a tav, he know knows it’s not ‘muh’ or ‘tuh’. Final sound, kiddo, no vowel, no uh-ing about it.
After two nights of reading Hebrew (he had been working with four vowels and six characters), he figured out that consonants don’t say their names in English, either!
and jar is not juh ah arr!
:eek:
It’s not like instant A+ in his reading, but it’s an instant improvement. I understand that handing kids learn letters and expecting them to blend like juh ah ar is not efficient. Words shouldn’t be a mystery.
But I don’t think that ABCs+sounds letters make+sounds consonants make with vowels +“phonics rules” (like ‘igh’ or ‘oo’ or ‘th’ and ‘th’) + the silent e rule is a bad place to start. 
I’m not going to tell Judah that ‘w’ is a vowel. He’s not a linguist. I can tell him about ow and ew and aw, though.
I think the letter-writer to Cecil was confused because he didn’t understand what a vowel’s purpose was. So Cecil could’ve explained it a little better…I still hate the ‘sometimes y and w’ crap. W is the one I hate. Some schools do it – but if that, why stop there? 
Eye =\ˈī
I = \ˈī, ə\ :dubious:
Well, I* am *a pie-rat…from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 
There’s academic knowledge and there’s general knowledge. General is = A E I O U and sometimes Y.
Academic is what we’ve been talking about (or mixing) in the thread. So I think it’s perfectly acceptable to say A E I O U are vowels and W is a consonant.
I also think it’s OK to say that this is a democratic nation or a democracy when we’re…erm…a constitutional republic with a representative democracy. I think the official term Colorado had us teach was “Constitutional Democratic Republic”.
It’s easy to be lazy with vowels when speaking. Not putting nouns into plural form makes me cringe, though.
To reiterate, how would you teach kids to write conventionally? A straight-up linguistics approach isn’t going to work (if you try it, please videotape it; it’d be freakin’ hilarious). However, when a kid writes that she “drk sm wotr”, I can remind her that every syllable needs a vowel in it, and then we can look at what vowels might be most appropriate, and suddenly she’s writing that she “drak sum woter,” which is a lot closer to conventional spelling.
And yes, an a can make a lot of different sounds. However, if I teach them to recognize the main circumstances under which it makes a long vowel sound (a followed by a consonant then an e, or ai), it helps them decode unfamiliar words; and teaching them to try the short vowel sound if the long vowel sound doesn’t work (as the a in cat) helps them decode still more words. I remind them that English spelling is messy, and that these tricks may not always work, but they work often enough to help a struggling reader until she develops a sufficiently large sight vocabulary.
I mean, those groupings serve a purpose when used in specific ways. There’s nothing ineffective at all with presenting A E I O U as “vowel letters” as a kind of pedagogy in early literacy. I’m saying only that it’s a misrepresentation to present letters as things that intrinsically generate or drive the sounds of the language. Both the question (“Is W a vowel?”), and Cecil’s answer, are meaningless if this isn’t made clear. No letter is a vowel, really–because all letters are silent: ink on paper (or pixels on a screen) don’t make sounds.
It’s easy to be lazy with vowels when speaking. Not putting nouns into plural form makes me cringe, though.
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What are you talking about? I don’t see any non-pluralized nouns in what Chronos wrote.
Except that it’s simply not true. I is frequenly a consonant, for instance; o and e are very occasionally consonants (as in one and Europe). And as someone pointed out upthread, the long-vowel/short-vowel distinction many of us were taught in grammar school is quite misleading; it doesn’t account for the true variety of English vowels. (Note: henceforth in this thread, when I write simply vowel, it will be shorthand for monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong; to refer to A, E, I, O, U, Y, & W as a class, I will write vowel letter*.
I agree that the the niceties of phonetics are too complex for 6-year-olds, and anybody who wants to test first-graders on the difference between diphthongs & monophthongs, or voiced versus voiceless plosives,or why there’s no best, non-confusing way to spell Qadhafi in English. But telling kids that y and w are sometimes vowels is the simple truth, and in the case of the former, so obvious a truth telling them otherwise would just end up irritating them.
To elaborate, if he’s like most kids–if he knows this–and if he has a desire and encouragement to read, he’ll learn it.
I honestly think it doesn’t matter that much one way or the other. If English is his first language, and if he gets adequate opportunity to practice with feedback, he’ll learn it.
If it were my son, I’d do whatever possible for him to have him emerged for some time, however brief, in some kind of spoken-Hebrew environment. He’s not going to truly learn the language from print alone, and it will make the written studies much more meaningful.
Ah. I think we’re all pretty much on the same page.
Also, I say cow…with a w sound. So I’m a pirate.
I was told for a long time that I sound snotty “when in proper company” or when first meeting someone. It’s not the words I use. It’s the words I don’t use - the lack of contractions, slang, ‘hey’, ‘um’, ‘heh’, and the way I pronounce things. I do use metaphors but I don’t fuck with my prepositions. I wouldn’t say, “She’s bringing up her kids to be Catholic” or “She took up the guitar”. I was just taught in school not to speak that way.
I didn’t know until three weeks ago that you could say those things in English in front of ‘educated’ company. I just thought it was slang and laziness! My linguistics prof had to actually spend 30 minutes with me after class explaining to me that it was just a verbal phrase while I scratched off all the sentences with “creative verbage” and insisting that have and up are not to be used in 400 different ways.
I was SO confused! I have not been in a grammar class since seventh grade, but I thought I was holding up quite nicely. (Please don’t tell my sixth grade Language Arts teacher that I said “holding up”.) I went to a very old-fashioned and grammar-heavy private school. Verbal phrases were used sparingly. Why? Because “verb phrases” equated to “slang” which meant “dumb”…and that was only the beginning. For example:
[ol]
[li]No one “brings up” their children to be bilingual. Bring up to what?* Educated people raise…*[/li][li] You could technically “bring up” your test score if you remember to write your name at the top. (It can’t be on the top. That would be silly. Who can write using 1/1000th of an inch?) However, it is preferable that you *raise your test score *instead of lifting up your paper.[/li][li] If it gets cold tomorrow, I will be sad. What was that you said? You will be sad if it gets cold tomorrow? (Past participle phrases were a a little sketch in sixth grade. I don’t even know what we were supposed to do with infinitive phrases. I really tried not to do this when we turned in written work.)[/li][li] Broadly speaking, the class did well on the exam. WHAT WAS THAT? You broadly spoke to the class? The class was speaking broadly? What’s that - relatively speaking? Oh, so you mean that The class did relatively well on the exam? Well, why didn’t you say so? Why does it sound like you can’t complete a thought?[/li][li] This would get you the I WILL NOT USE MISPLACED MODIFIERS x10 on a piece of paper if you said it aloud (because only crazy peope talk in a loud voice for no reason [“out loud”]): [/li][QUOTE]
Yelling, he told me — oh! I mean, uh, my brother yelled…uh…ahhh…"
[/QUOTE]
[li] Just so you know, only uneducated people say* I was in gymnastics when I was younger.* Nobody gets inside the sport of gymnastics. You can be in a class, though.[/li][li] If you really want to distinguish yourself from the other essayists (never from the pool of essays, because essays can’t swim), then you should be very careful with past participle phrases…and no one will be impressed if you *took up the violin *at age three, unless maybe you lived in a ghetto. Where did you take the violin? Upstairs? If you had lessons but said that you “took” them, then someone will think you’re a thief. If you enroll in a class, however, you should be safe. While taking a class is considered part of the everyday lexicon, you should probably not tell this to the Board of Admissions. It is always better to enroll in a class or receive lessons. Stealing classes is wrong. But if you had lessons, does this mean you don’t have them anymore? [/li][li] Dangling modifiers, while sometimes poetic, should not be used in academic writing. If you write a poem then you are allowed to use dangling modifiers. Unless, of course, my teacher thought it was sloppy. [/li][/ol].
We did a shit ton of creative writing and lit (Shakespeare, Dickens, classic American poetry) but that was (whew!) taught by another teacher. She was fond of saying things like, “If you fall and break your neck, you’re dead meat!” at recess.
How did I know when something was proper? I used these two rules:
- Would I use it in an academic paper or on a college application? (Would my grammar teacher frown at me?)
- If I said this to a non-native speaker (especially an older one), would they know what I was saying? (In this case, “Amelia Bedilia” and “foreign speaker” are synonymous.)
It took me years to “stop talking like a moron” (public school lingo) after I left that school.
My writing has been influenced in all the wrong ways. teh intarwebs make me lazy.
[quote=“Skald_the_Rhymer, post:54, topic:580052”]
What are you talking about? I don’t see any non-pluralized nouns in what Chronos wrote.
I was just saying that it’s easy to be lazy with vowels. But when a non-native English speaker says “I want to order french fry”, this cringy-thing happens inside.
Hence “sight word”: One.
I’m down with Y.
From Mariam-Webster:
It can be considered a vowel, but I’d count initial r [ɹ] (as in read) as a semivowel glide, like y [j] and w [w]. You can hold it, but it doesn’t sound like the actual letter unless you move your mouth. The sound is actually made by the movement.
Oh, and just for CitizenPained’s benefit: I was taught only phonics. The method I was taught usually had you reading real books by the end of first grade. We actually learned that every letter only had one sound, and only after we’d mastered that did we learn the exception rules. We never did move on to words that just don’t seem to follow any rules: that I learned by osmosis.
However, I was taught the exact opposite of you when it comes to English grammar. I was taught to always speak at the level I would for, say, a sixth grader, and to write as I speak. I used to sound overly correct when I spoke, but, with that help, I mellowed out. Some would probably say too much!
He does learn spoken Hebrew at school. They just don’t focus on print until later. There are no pure bilingual Hebrews schools (where instruction is in Hebrew) in town. He’ll be fluent in Modern by the end of HS. I just figured, hey, why not? Having kids learn how to read two languages simultaneously is a good thing. (:
[QUOTE]
I was sort of a reading maniac by first grade. I suppose it helped.
I was taught to write ‘properly’, speak ‘proper English’ (and yes, I did self-correct) and to speak ‘better than’ others. Others being a word for “the stupid masses”. We had informal language, sure…but some things were a no-no. sigh Preposition lists, irregular verbs, diagrams…spelling tests K-8…This school was: reading, writing, arithmetic. Behaviorism at its best!
Our Lit/Creative Writing classes were different. Shakespeare was a must. Robert Frost was a must. The torturous Charles Dickens made you a better person! But I also got to read* Rats of NIMH*, so it evened out. And I could write without worrying about Mr. Johnson tsking me. 
My dad was an Evangelical Christian, so he sent me to a Christian school. (He had primary custody.) Despite the shady biology class, a heavily edited library, the myths about AIDs, sex, black people, Jews, Russians…I still turned out to be a well-read Jewish Democrat. 
I’m perfectly comfortable with code-switching. Sometimes I’m lazy, but hey. Better that than worrying about misplaced modifiers, slang, and verb phrases. :o