Some of this is along the lines of ‘zero is nothing’ or ‘black is lack of color’. Its kind of a starting point for conceptual thinking.
if they have comprehensible and systematic input as guidance, along with encouragement to provide motivation. (If they don’t see reading valued–especially at home–they’re at a serious disadvantage, and pure phonics alone can’t make up for that.)**
I’m the only reader in my immediate family. Reading was demanded at school. :o
Yup, that’s what I was saying.
It tripped up my son. It wasn’t until Hebrew reading started that he ‘caught on’ to the vowel concept.
Cat should never be a ‘sight word’. Cat can be read.
Is isn’t it “this is what makes (or can make) the chuh sound”, instead of c+h=Ch?
I mean, chai and chai are two different things if the latter is Hebrew.
Of course. But you can still teach kiddos how to read. Reading is not like speaking. Kids will figure out language on their own. But reading is this man-made system of complex rules that requires a combination of certain cognitive developments before a student can ‘get the rules’.
I think there is a right way and a wrong way to teach ‘phonics’. imho, my son’s school does it the wrong way. “Sight words” are now described as commonly used words in children’s books. When I was a kid, a “sight word” was one that followed no rule. Most of his ‘sight words’ are words that he would be able to know if he just knew that certain combinations of letters make sounds. Cripes. No wonder my high school students suck at reading.
I wasn’t taught the way I described in “common mistakes”. It was a starting point, but a preschool starting point. And from then on, it was ‘phonics’ (old school, I guess – sounds) and spelling tests.
Yes, this is the accent feature known as Canadian raising; for speakers with this feature, the diphthongs “ow” or “aye”, when followed by a voiceless consonant, are rendered using a different starting position than otherwise (roughly something like the difference between “ah” and “uh”). As it happens, many parts of the U.S. also have this phenomenon for the “aye” diphthong but not the “ow” diphthong, so to potentially observe an analogous effect to what Northern Piper describes, try comparing the vowels of “lie” and “lice”.
The rest of this thread is in desperate need of commentary from at least one linguist.
imho sounding out letters is where you *should *start, provided you do it correctly. And then start grouping together letters that make ‘vowel’ sounds, consonant combos (like ck), the rules of y, and things like what’s up with c and g?
Teaching my son some y and erules improved his reading (and spelling) a ton. I’m not kidding. Total transformation within a week.
Now “bunny” is “bunny” instead of “bune”. “My” is “my” instead of “mi”. “Little” is “little” instead of “litl”. Sure, he has to think about it, but his reading ‘speed’ and decoding has improved dramatically.
Every letter needs to be ‘read’, but not every letter ‘says its name’. I wouldn’t spell my name JoyAqnn, because the q has no purpose. I am sure there are plenty of words with erroneous letters, but you get what I mean.
I’m not a genius or a master linguist and I *hate *phonetics studies because I can’t always hear things! I feel sorry for deaf children who are in speech therapy. And the IPA confuses me.
I don’t mind dissecting parts of speech and analyzing the purposes of grammar rules, but I’m more interested in neurolinguistics or degrees of 'socio’linguistics. I love teaching ESL – but that’s because I love my Hispanic community. I’m a licensed social studies teacher.
I also dislike being around pint-size people (besides my own). :dubious: I guess I assumed that my son’s teachers knew what they were doing. $14k/yr tuition, ffs. It’s not their fault that teaching trends go in circles, but I was really worried about my son. What are were doing is nothing like how I was taught, but I figured it “worked” on everyone. It’s possible that they are implicating it wrong, but I hate it. Hate it. Hate it.
So? What do you mean by “read,” then? Just because a word “can be read” is no reason why it shouldn’t become a sight word. That’s the whole goal. “Sight words” aren’t just for kids learning. The eye of a competent adult reader takes in on average three words in an instant. We don’t read words one by one–we read them in chunks. Proficient readers process language more in the rear of the brain, where comprehension is less temporally bound than speech is.
When I say, “all words can be read”, I don’t mean, “every letter should be sounded out” by emerging readers. I also don’t think that all words should be separately parsed as readers become more competent. As you pointed out, that’s not only silly, but antithetical to how the brain works.
I’ve read so much that I ‘speed read’ with efficiency (err–in my native language). I’m not talking about the ‘eye of a competent adult reader’. I’m talking about the cognitive processes of a five year old.
I started teaching my son vowel ‘sounds’ by groups. For example,
E:
ea
ee
y
A:
ai
ey
eigh
O:
ow
oa
ough
I:
ie
y
igh
u/oo:
oo/oo (foot v. root)
ui
But I don’t say, "All right. Here are all possible combinations for the sounds of “A” in one weekend. It’s more like:
nay
say
stay
lay
and
rain
gain
and
sane
lane
etc., but I won’t do all sounds for A before I move on to all sounds for E. He’d throw the book at me.
So what is your approach to teaching kindergarteners how to read, exactly? How is handing parents a 90 word list of ‘commonly used words’ as ‘sight words’ good teaching practice? Whoopeeedoo. My son could recognize “she” and couldn’t recognize the “sh” sound in “ship”.
edit: I made up a jeopardy game with some new written sound combos he learned, ‘short vowel’ sounds, ‘y’ in E v. I and the like. no, i don’t use the IPA with a 6 year old. (: but there was a section on ‘what’s the rule?’ - that’s what later contributes to the ‘fast reading’ of adults. i can sound out a new word because i know ‘the rules’.
Probably, but that’s definitely a special case. For one, unlike almost all other language, it exists primarily as a written word, rather than spoken, and it’s not even completely unambiguous how it’s pronounced (though the consensus seems to be forming on “pone”). For another, one can make the case that W isn’t the vowel of that word (or at most, is only part of a diphthong), but that the actual primary vowel is represented by P (whose normal sound is one of the few in English which can absolutely never be a vowel).
“pwn” is a very special case, in that its entire existence (according to the most popular theory) originates as a typo. You can’t really discuss “pwn” without looking at “own”, whose digraph <ow> is clearly the correspondent of the same “low”, “tow”, “grow” /oU/ diphthong used in the common pronunciation of “pwn”.
I can’t wait until a linguist publishes a great read on netspeak. It’s almost like the absence of vowels in ‘pwn’ indicates that it is not to be spoken.
And you’re a Physics teacher? So you think it’s a good idea to talk about friction and air resistance when introducing F=ma to your first-semester students?
Powers &8^]
Whether the h is silent in what depends on one’s accent, methinks. Perhaps Northerners and Welshmen pronounce that word as /hwɒt/, but we don’t put up with that sort of silliness here in the South.
As for bawl & crawl, here in the South (i.e., in civilized lands, where sir is not an insult, you is not plural, and grits are easily available), both words are pronounced to rhyme with ball, whose vowel is not a diphthong. I think it reasonable to say that our pronunciation (i.e., the correct one) treats w as a silent letter. But this may be less clear to persons who hail from places without sweet tea constantly on hand.
The W in “bawl” helps to distinguish it from “ball” when reading print, but it doesn’t represent any difference in SAE pronunciation. Really what the “W” really does is remind us that the word has Latin origins.
The difference in the spelling of these two words (ball and bawl) demonstrates exactly why Cecil’s answer is at best meaningless. To say that W is a “vowel” because it’s written directly after the “A” makes as much sense as saying that the “G” and the “H” in “straight” are vowels.
I was writing colloquially. Is there a word you would have preferred I use instead to indicate that the ‘w’ changes the pronunciation of the word?
(And, I hasten to add, I was merely paralleling Skald’s original usage of “silent” to indicate that the letter doesn’t affect the pronunciation. So get off my case!)
Powers &8^]
Yeah, why not? Teachers say things like “An object in motion tends to stay in motion” and “An object’s weight does not affect the speed at which it falls”, and students might think in response “Huh? That makes no sense; it doesn’t seem to jibe with what I know and daily perceive of the world.” Might as well nip that confusion in the bud by explaining, at some introductory level, how friction and air resistance account for the apparent discrepancies; you don’t have to go into the actual equations of friction and air resistance in order to say “These are phenomena that exist which roughly behave like so-and-so but which we are going to ignore in our models of the world for now”.
(In fact, so far as I can recall, every intro physics course I ever took did start that way… The reason we’re all so aware that intro physics courses tend to ignore friction and air resistance in their mathematical models is because they generally also take care to explicitly note that they’re ignoring friction and air resistance in their mathematical models, which of course means they’ve bothered to talk about, at at least some level, the concepts)
The W doesn’t change anything. People say the word as they naturally do, and this is not driven by the spelling. We use letters in print to represent the way we talk, more or less, and in English sometimes it’s less. Often the “less” occasions are when origins of a word are carried over orthographically and the historic changes of the pronunciation of the word aren’t reflected by corresponding changes in the spelling.
There are some few people who do alter their natural speech because of what they see in print. The technical term for this is “hypercorrection”–more commonly known as affectation. (People hypercorrect with grammar, too, when they say things like “Between you and I,” etc.) But this is not representative of the language itself.
This mistaken notion that the letters somehow drive the pronunciation of a language is what I meant by saying “all letters are silent.” Language is speech, first.
It wasn’t until Hebrew reading started that he ‘caught on’ to the vowel concept.
Most of his ‘sight words’ are words that he would be able to know if he just knew that certain combinations of letters make sounds. Cripes. No wonder my high school students suck at reading.