2. "Looks like we spend most of our time
Inging ... You know, like sleeping,
eating, running,
climbing..." Dennis the Menace
3. Inspiration
1. Reoccurring issues in productive skills
2. Phonology influences pronunciation (and orthography
tries to capture it!)
3. History of English and orthography
4. Lack in pronunciation/phonics focus in curricula
5. Resistance to general “because that’s the way it is!”
mentality
3
4. Students and Background
ESL - English Academic Purposes, Adult
Literacy, General English courses
Intensive English Setting
Oral Communication Skills
Phonics Classes
Beginning Vocabulary + Phonics
Volunteer-Based Literacy Classes
Low Literacy (including native language)
4
Disparity in Skills Learners
Fluency-Accuracy Imbalanced Learners
Limited Native-Literacy Learners
Beginning Learners
5. Overview of Upcoming
Information
1. Theory / Linguistics
Phonics Knowledge (throughout presentation)
Vocabulary Knowledge
Morphology (Inflectional Morphemes)
2. Integrating Skills Activities
Allomorphs + Activities
3. Building Essential Phonics Skills
Vowels + Spelling Phonetics
4. Two Additional Activities with Inflectional
Morphemes
5
6. Explicit Phonics Teaching
I find useful…
• Working Knowledge
• Classification of consonants (see hand out)
• Classification of vowels (see hand out)
• Syllables (Monosyllabic, Multisyllabic words)
• Stress Patterns
• Key Vocabulary
• Consonant, Consonant Clusters, Vowels
• Elements of phonology: Voiced, Voiceless, Fricative, Affricate, Nasal,
Liquid, Glide
• Prefix, Root, Suffix
• Word forms (noun, adjective, past participle, comparative, etc.)
6
7. Morphology
Grammatical tags
to words
Identify parts of
speech
Our focus:
Inflectional
Morphemes
Retrieved from:
http://www.mathcs.duq.ed
u/~packer/Courses/Psy59
8/Ling-Morphology.pdf
7
8. Today’s Focus
Inflectional Morphemes
-s plural (s’, -en irregular)
-s third person singular present;
-’s – possessive (thought to
possibly just be a “clitic”)
-ed/t - past tense;
-en past participles (-ed, -d, -t, -n, -
ne, too)
-ing - present participle
-er comparative
-est superlative
And the confusion ensues…
-ing: Use for continuous aspect and
verbal nouns
and
-ed: Use for perfect aspect and
passive voice
Participial phrases
Adjectival participles (sometimes
are PURE adjectives)
Adverbial participles
And then, irregular forms! But many of
them have historical and phonological
reasons!!!
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10. Allomorphs
An allomorph is one morpheme that
has different “surface” forms
depending on phonological rules.
“s” endings / “ed” endings
Spelling / Pronunciation disparity.
And how about that double
consonant spelling convention?
10
pin pinned tug tugged sob sobbed
bag bagged nag nagged jam jammed
tap tapped rip ripped cap capped
12. Vowels!
12
Let’s refer to the vowel handouts
• Many conventions of organization
• Variation in dialects
• What conventions are worth teaching students?
• “Long Vowels” / “Short Vowels”
• Diphthongs
• “r” colored vowels
• Water / standard
• Reduced vowels
• About / synthesis / harmony / medium / decimal / syringe
13. Vowels with Communicative
Meaning
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(Celce-Murica; Brinton; Goodwin; 2011, pg. 151)
Ahhh! (satisfaction)
Aw. (sympathy)
Ow! (pain)
Oh? (interest)
Oh. (comprehension)
Uh-Oh (trouble)
Ew! (disgust)
Oops! (mistake)
Aha! (discovery)
Huh? (confusion)
Boo! (frightening someone)
Uh-uh. (no)
Uh-huh. (yes)
By the way, I’ve never seen so
much interest spark in a class
as when “Onomatopoeia”
came up and we visited
Wikipedia’s list of English
words. Phew!
14. Spelling Conventions with
Vowels + Morphemes
14
Short-vowels must always have TWO consonants before adding a suffix
beginning with a vowel, to keep the short-vowel sound.
Long-vowel words need only one.
(from Phonics Pathways, 10th edition, 2011)
Long
Short
- ed -ing -er
Hope Hoped Hoping Hoper
Hop Hopped Hopping Hopper
Bake Baked Baking Baker
Back Backed Backing Backer
15. Comparatives (and Superlatives)
15
(+) r Double the
consonant
+ er
*short V*
(+) er
*short/long V*
- (y)
+ (ier)
+ more
*syllables*
Irregular
forms
Larger Redder
(Reddest)
Smaller
(Smallest)
Heavier
(Heaviest)
More (most)
expensive
Better
(best)
Looser Hotter
(Hottest)
Richer
(Richest)
Friendlier
(Friendliest)
More (most)
important
Worse
(worst)
Nicer Thinner
(Thinnest)
Younger
(Youngest)
Spicier
(Spiciest)
More (most)
comfortable
Tamer Fatter (Fattest) Greener
(Greenest)
Healthier
(Spiciest)
More (most)
convenient
Large Red Loose Hot Small Expensive
Nice Heavy Tame Good Convenient
Tame Fat Thin Green Healthy Comfortable
Nice Bad Rich Young Friendly Spicy
16. The Balance
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• Imbedding these activities into current curricula
• Developing a phonics based course that builds on presented skills.
• Creating linguistic knowledge with terminology if it makes sense for your
population
• Creating games w/ flash cards, colored cards, wall space, etc.
• Your own ideas!
Happy to send you a copy of my slides and resources or answer other questions.
Questions?
heidilaidemitt@berkeley.edu
Editor's Notes
By teaching phonics and grammar simultaneously, students are able to practice their pronunciation in a meaningful way that informs different language skills. This workshop focuses on word endings – a part of English words that is often omitted, mispronounced, and misspelled. Activities and resources are provided.Unfortunately, English does not have a strong symbol-sound correspondence; therefore, spoken language may erroneously inform writing, and vice-versa.----- Meeting Notes (3/28/14 10:24) ------ goal to expose you to sources (digital and print)
English is a weakly inflected language compared to others, but these sites of changes are important for language learners to produce intelligibly, and I would note especially outside of our classrooms as I have had many stories come back to me (and witnessed) where something has gone awry just because of a sound or spelling!So back to the phonics: I could do a separate presentation on phonological changes in our words (recognized as irregulars), but the focus here is for more rule-based phonological patterns that we can in fact teacher learners.
Productive Skills: errors with pronunciation/spelling/omitting the end of words. Regardless of level, students oftentimes struggle with productive skills in both spoken and written grammar. For example, many students overgeneralize the "-ed" sound exemplified in "wanted" for all regular simple past verbs.Further, students may not draw awareness to the abundance of irregular simple past verbs, and thus, continue to produce verbs that do not exist. Interestingly, despite students often "knowing" third-person singular verb conjugation, many students omit the "-s" endings or do not say "z" or "-es" in pronunciation. These kinds of errors may lower student confidence, cause stigmatization, and impede acquisition of receptive language skills.Another interesting phenomenon is KNOWING the form, but not recognizing it when they read it. GO-ESI often noticed that learners are trying to use their speaking/listening skills to inform their writing, and unfortunately, English orthography is a lot crazier than that! Fortunately, however, if one digs a little deeper, we as teachers can uncover some real regularities in spelling that can inform correct writing and pronunciation of these words! These kind of rules are coming from CONNNECT IN Touch base phonology In other words, we can debunk “that’s the way it is!” as much as possible to inform learners of rules they can apply across their language acquisition in general.
However, I would like to add that with some special student populations, there is a real disparity between their Speaking/Listening, so we may have a relatively “fluent” speaker with low accuracy, OR relatively high fluent/accurate speakers with low or emerging literacy. In particular, I would like to comment that many “beginning” learners I’ve encountered have either had limited literacy development in their native language (like immigrant populations), or come from primarily oral languages (like many Arabic speaking learners who come to the US to learn English).OVERALL Integrating different skills is something that I have found to be important for learners who have imbalanced skills performance and primarily rely on their strongest skill(s).
Please make sure to address FORM / MEANING / USE *I focus on form: the mechanics of the language for the purposes of my presentation, but it should not be taught only in isolation.
This is really up to you and your learners
"In addition to serving as resources in the creation of vocabulary, morphemes supply grammatical tags to words, helping us to identify on the basis of form the parts of speech of words in sentences we hear or read.Affix: A word element--a prefix, suffix, or infix--that can be attached to a base or root to form a new word. Affixes are bound morphemes. Most teachers find these very important to teach as they are productive. Inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. This is what I will focus on today as I have noticed that it causes the most confusion among students across the skills of reading, writing, speaking, and vocabulary knowledge.
Problems with inflectional morphology Fluency may indicate an understanding of the word, that is the “lemma” but poor inflectional morphology, which may cause repeated errors and perhaps an unawareness of producing themNow, having a command over these elements is important depending on your context and the questions that arise in class. Also, depending on the style of the student, they may want to know these exact grammatical forms as well.. (and it may actually help them!)
Nice little introduction to the idea! Lack of sound-spelling correspondence. A clever student might find a word like “mom” and ask to repeat it over and over!
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes.Note the three different pronunciations of the plural morpheme (on the basis of phonological characteristics of the preceding consonant). Different surface realisations of what is essentially the same thing (a plural marker) are known as allomorphs.**Direct everyone to hand outs for a bit **In order to understand this double consonant spelling… let’s hit another basic that I find important to teach learners: Vowels!
Okay, before I go into the theory behind this a little bit, I want to tap into your native and/or highly proficient English skills. Starting from the top left, let’s read across. These are nonsense words, but try to read them Great! A couple might have been a little wonky, but what you are doing here are applying orthography/pronunciation skills you already know. In fact, nonsense words illustrate that something is informing your pronunciation skills, even if English vowels are crazy. This also reminds me of a rhyme game that my 4-year old nephew once initiated with me. He told me that we would have to take turns coming up with word that rhymed. I’ll always remember that when he said “fence,” I said “hence – which he declared that was not a word and I did not get a point. Rather, “chence” was a word and he got a point.
The importance of knowing vowels: as it is a rich part of the confusing spelling system of English. A little basic warm-up I like to do is have students only say the vowels in their names. This teaches the idea of a “nucleus” and “core” importance of a vowel: e – o, I, I E, I, U, I Removal of vowels in similar sounding words Get them noticing different spelling patterns out in the wild!
This is just a nice thing to throw in to get students interesting in sound-spelling conventions. As much as possible!
Remind leaners that English likes the *e* endings to retain LONG vowel sounds. English likes *double* consonants to retain the SHORT vowel sounds when build multisyllabic words Activity ideas: Spelling bees, creating worksheets that contrast these, integrating specific verbs depending on the grammar point you might be teaching, asking students to identify the short vowels or long vowels; peer-editing that exhibit these errors (and they do come up!). For example, a nice activity I like to is take students to café and have them write for me “describe what you see.” In this instance, the present continuous naturally emerges.
*How to use the comparative versus the superlative General Rule / Exceptions / Phonological Background Understanding that it signifies adjectives (double check this) http://www.enchantedlearning.com/grammar/partsofspeech/adjectives/ ‘Notice that all the example base morphemes only have one or two syllables. Adjectives with more than two syllables care made comparative and superlative by the addition of words (more; most), not inflectional morphemes.Some adverbs can take the same comparative and superlative inflections (-er; -est) that adjectives take:drove longerran fasterplayed harderMany adverbs cannot take these inflections, however. Notice the awkwardness of the following phrases:He said slylier.She danced awkwardliest. Like some adjective, these same examples can use more and most to create comparatives and superlatives:He said more slyly.She danced most awkwardly.
