Freeman 7 & 8 Read and Retell

These two chapters in Freeman both deal with morphology and its implications in teaching reading and teaching a second language. Although I have never taken a class in which I remember discussing morphology per se, I found the information in these two chapters fascinating. I love words and grammar, and reading about both topics was an enjoyable experience.

The Freemans have a knack for explaining concepts and ideas more simply than Finegan. They also emphasize different aspects of the topic. Although chapter 7 covered similar topics to our last Finegan reading (bound and free morphemes, types of languages, word etymology), some different topics included:
1) the differences between analytic (English) vs. synthetic (Latin) languages
2) traditional vs. current approaches to classifying words (I loved reading about the no preposition at the end of a sentence rule and its origin.)

Having entire chapters devoted to implications for teaching reading and second languages is a strength of this book. The Freemans obviously espouse a sociopyscholinguistic view of reading and the bias against the Put Reading First and word recognition view of reading surfaces throughout the chapter. I tend to be an eclectic practicioner when it comes to teaching philosophies. I think both views can offer teachers and students ideas to approaching reading and second language learning. I think some of this has to do with what type of learner a student is and the personal backgrounds of the students. I agree with the Freemans that words can't all be learned, they have to be acquired; but I do think words can and should be learned in context rich settings.

The info on Krashen's Natural Order hypothesis was new and interesting. His research and others show that morphemes are acquired in a fixed order depending on the language being learned rather than the native language of the learner. This can be helpful info for a teacher as he/she approaches teaching a second language.

Academic language and the difficulty in teaching and learning finished out chapter 8. I have first hand experience with this. Having lived in Germany for a year, my everyday German became quite proficient. After a year, however, I still had issues with reading higher level newspapers and journals; the vocabulary was beyond my grasp. That it takes at least 5 years to acquire academic language is important for all teachers to remember when dealing with ELLs.

19 February class

It was somewhat a relief to finish class this past Thursday. It was a stressful weekend and week prior to it with work related responsibilities, another grad course's assignments and getting done with this course's assignments on time. My favorite part of class on Thursday was when the native Chinese speakers took over and talked about our exercises that focused on Chinese pictographic characters. It was fun seeing them draw their characters online. I have a hard time understanding how Chinese can be written quickly. Also, given the one example with the words that all ended in -ing, it made me think how difficult working with the Chinese tones would be.

As far as morphology is concerned, I really enjoyed the content in this chapter and the focus on lexical labels and such. I learned about a group called SPOGG--Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. I'm thinking I may join. Maybe Will Smith is a member, too.

Week 5 class

One trend I seem to be noticing in our time together online is that fewer and fewer people are using their headsets to speak. I can understand why...it seems there is less frustration with the technology if people don't try to speak. Esther's voice is almost always easily heard and understood, but many others are still having difficulties.

The most useful part of class last time was going through the exercises together. Although I had one of the exercises entirely wrong, it was good to hear the logic and reasoning behind the ideas of phonemes vs. allophones. I also appreciate Dr. Schmidt's understanding that we're novices in this whole area; it was nice to be graded for effort rather than correctness on the non-IPA transcription part of the assignment.

Finegan 2 Read & Retell

Chapter 2 of Finegan proved fun to read. I love grammar so it was interesting getting to analyze simpler concepts like parts of speech at a deeper level. This chapter dealt with lexicon and morphology, terms that are now more understandable to me following the reading.

Morphemes are the smallest linguistic unit carrying meaning. They can stand alone (free) or need something to attach to (bound). Bound morphemes tend to carry information regarding plurality, case, tense and person. It was interesting to learn that although English uses bound morphemes in the form of affixes (prefixes and suffixes), other languages have infixes and circumfixes--two terms I had never heard before.

A language can expand itself by manipulating morphemes through compounding, reduplication, affixation and shortening. Again, it was interesting to see how English doesn't really reduplicate like other languages. Having learned German, I very much understoods the reference to German using the concept of compounding to the extreme; it has some very long and complex words.

Languages can also add to themselves by borrowing words from other languages. Again, having learned German, I know German borrowed a great many words from the French, the English and the Americans in the last two centuries. Germans will even try to pronounce most of the words like the borrowed language...like Kusin (a French word for male cousin) and e-Mail (an American word).

The discussion of morphological systems--inflectional, isolating and agglutinatin--proved the most difficult to understand. The inflectional made the most sense to me--again because of my knowledge of German.

I had never heard of corpus study, but it proved interesting to think about distribution verses frequency within a set of texts organized by genre. The most commonly used words did not surprise me. That the most common verbs were "to be" and "to have" also made much sense. Having learned German, those verbs are highly important.

Read & Retell (Freeman 5 & 6, Finegan 12)

This week's readings basically provided information on orthography, how writing systems developed, and how to view spelling and reading instruction based on knowledge of orthography and phonetics.

Writing is a rather new phenomenon that came about from earlier use of pictograms that originally represented objects or ideas. Basically, writing systems can be syllabic (symbols represent syllables like cuneiform), logographic (symbols represent morphemes/words like modern Chinese) and alphabetic (symbols represent phonemes). English is alphabetic. Unfortunately, English does not achieve a one to one correspondence between sounds and letters, which has led to a rather complex system of spelling...much to the chagrin of ELLs.

Language evolves. As such its orthography evolves also. English, for example, has gone through periods known as Old English, Middle English and Modern English. American influences have brought about changes to English as well. Basically, English spelling can be determined by three forces--phonetic (spell words the way they sound), semantic (spell words alike that share meaning), and etymological (spell words to reflect origin). Although English spelling is complex, patterns do emerge. Teaching students about these patterns may be the most effective way of teaching spelling.

Finally, knowledge of writing and spelling will influence how teachers teach spelling and reading. The two main camps, which we have read about previously, are the word recognition (WR) view and the sociopsycholinguistic (SPL) view. The WR people focus on a systematic and explicit use of phonics to help students with a part to whole view of words and language arts. The SPL people teach students to construct meaning through background and one of three linguistic cueing systems, including graphophonics, within the context of real texts and settings.

Week 4 class

Week 4 took on a different tone. We definitely had fewer students using their mics to speak. It's interesting that in an online class, students still get self conscious about speaking. I think some of it may have had to do with the technical difficulties we had the previous week, but I think there still is a certain level of timid behavior online.

Working through the exercises proved helpful. Most of us were having issues with understanding the exercises with the languages of Fiji and Samoa. It helped to know that many of us were struggling through them. Although I still have tentative feelings about my understanding of some of these linguistic principles, the period did help greatly.

Another observation that amused me was the chatter about the quiz and homework. I didn't think the amount of material on the quiz was that demanding, but a good number of people voiced otherwise. I'm wondering if this has to do with age, nationality, personal calendars or other factors. What was great to hear was our professor, Esther, listening. She reminded us that the course should have certain demands at the 600 level, but she also lengthened the time to do the quiz by 24 hours. It was a good solution.

Freeman & Freeman 3-4 Read and Retell

When students do not grasp concepts we teach, we often reteach with a different presentation of the information or focus on a different modality of learning. F & F's presentation on phonology provided clear and concise information that proved cloudy for me in Finegan. It reinforced the idea that phonology is complex, and the great majority of young children acquire and master it in context without ever having formally learned it.

Chapter 3 reviewed many of the terms we studied in Finegan. F & F focused on how vowels (air passing freely through vocal tract and influenced by tongue and lips) and consonants (constricting air in various ways between lungs and lips) are formed. The charts in F & F helped me organize the various vowel and consonants sounds much better than Finegan. The information on why tongue twisters are difficult for people to say quickly was new information. Now I don't feel so bad when I can't do it well. The "Peggy Babcock" example had me laughing out loud as I attempted it.

Chapter 4 focused almost entirely on how phonology can influence the teaching of reading and a second language. Basically, F & F talked about the two main camps in the field of teaching reading--word recognition and sociopsycholinguistic. Phonemic awareness plays a larger role in the teaching of the word recognition view of reading; it is taught and drilled. In the sociopsycholinguistic view phonemic awareness is acquired through experiencing language. Focusing on learning through making meaning is the key. F & F traced the evolution of second language instruction, from the grammar translation method to the audiolingual method to the Natural Approach and sustained content language teaching. The focus in most of today's classrooms is using language to communicate. Teachers need to understand phonological differences (with allophones, dialects and the language itself) in language in order to better serve their second language learners.

Week 3 class

It was good getting to hear other people explain the content from our readings this week, especially the information from the small group discussion. I had read everything beforehand, but I didn't necessarily feel comfortable with all the terms. The small group discussion helped. It was frustrating as far as the technology goes, but hopefully we will be able to work that out. It's definitely a good thing to speak and listen rather than just type in the chat area.

I really love the spirit of our group. Even though many of us have not met each other in person, there seems to be a good sense of collegiality already. People are very encouraging while we are live and also in the comments in the threaded discussions. Thursday afternoons are becoming something I look forward to.