Week 7: Morphology & Implications

I enjoy this week’s reading. First, I think Chapter 7 of Freeman & Freeman has gone pretty much the same content as the last week’s reading. They both go through the importance of morphology, words’ classifications, and a number of ways that new words create. On chapter 8, there are two different insights of morphology between the word recognition view and the sociopsycholinguistic view. In the view of recognition, words can sometimes identified by looking for the meaning parts or morphemes, while in the view of sociopsycholinguistic view, words will be learnt by reading extensively. In my case, I think both have intertwined my learning of English. At the beginning of my learning, it was very useful to use some prefixes, roots, or suffixes to predict the meanings or classifications of words. In the book, it says that about 60% of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so I would think learning the meaning of the root "step by step" might be helpful for students to build up their word vocabulary. After students gain a certain amount of words knowledge, exposing them in different contexts can develop a sense of how the word is used, not just learning definitions.

Week 6’s class (2/19): The Beauty of Chinese Characters

Today I was so nervous to go through the Chinese writing activity with our fellow classmates. Even though I was sweating during the presenting, I really appreciate such a good opportunity like this for me to introduce my language to everyone in the online class. I know that my oral English speech was not intelligible enough, I hope it did not make other fellow classmates lose their interests on the Chinese language, which is one of the beautiful languages in the worlds.

At the end of this class, I am not quite clear of what we are going to do with Wiki site? Does anyone have any ideas?

Week 6: Lexicon and Morphology

The chapter mainly covers the concepts of lexical categories, three ways of how languages extend their words, and three morphological systems. There are three ways to identify words’ categories, and they are: related forms, the occurrence of words, and meanings. New words can be formed by adding morphemes to an existing word, borrowing from other languages, and invention. As for the morphological systems, isolating morphology, which is “one morpheme per word,” like Chinese and Vietnamese, agglutinating morphology, whose words can be segmented into parts such as English and Turkish, and inflectional morphology like German and some words in English.

While reading through this chapter it made me to think of my grammar books. It makes sense to me now that why my grammar books introduce these categories one by one: verbs, nouns, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions. Ordinarily, verb category includes transitive and intransitive verbs. Noun category has singular and plural forms, and plural forms have regular, irregular, or same forms. Pronoun category has several subcategories, such as personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, indefinite pronouns, while conjunction category has two principal, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. So this reading reflects what I’ve learnt from English grammar somehow.

Week 5’s class (2/12): Chinese Writing

It’s quite interesting to discuss logographic writing like Chinese characters, which is my native language, during the small group discussion. After moving back to the main discussion room, we’re talking about a matter, is it difficult for Chinese people to learn alphabetic writing like English letters? In Chinese, several phonetic systems are designed to indicate Mandarin pronunciation such as the Wade-Giles spelling system, Postal spelling system, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Yale spelling system, Chu-Yin Fu-Hao system, and is gradually being placed by Hanyu Pinyin in mainland China. But you can still find some primary school textbooks, dictionaries, and newspapers annotated in Chu-Yin Fu-Hao in Taiwan. So what I was learning is the system of Chu-Yin Fu-Hao. For me myself learning alphabetic experience, it wasn’t that hard at all but it took me a while to memorize those 26 letters. They are just different ways to write. I remember that my teacher used the picture as shown on Figure 1 to teach us the English vowel letters “a, e, i, o, u” and helped our memory. As a result of drawing the five vowels, it looks like a girl's face. Isn't it interesting? I'm sure I will never forget it. As for another question arose during the discussion, what does the Chinese keyboard look like? Figure 2 gives the answer.

[Figure 1]

[Figure 2]

Week 5: Writing & Orthography

The reading for this week is mainly focused on writing system. I would think it is a good idea to read Finegan first and then Freeman, because Finegan mainly talks about the writing systems, which is in general while Freeman & Freeman have gone deeper notions about English orthography, which is more specific. In Finegan textbook, three types of writing system are referred and they are a syllabic writing, a logographic writing, and an alphabetic writing. In syllabic writing system the written symbols represent whole syllables, such as cuneiform writing system, and the logographic graphic symbols represent words or morphemes, such as Chinese logographic system while the alphabetic graphs represent sounds or phonemes, such as Roman alphabet.

English is one of many languages which use the Roman alphabetic graphs to represent its writing letters. However, English orthography does not have close correspondence between letters and phonemes. English has twenty-six written Roman letters but it has at least thirty-six sounds. Due to the shortage of the letters, some phonemes must be presented by a combination of letters. For example, the letters “th” represent the phoneme /ɵ/. Hence, this causes confusion. In the textbook, Freeman & Freeman reach several implications of teaching reading, playing games to help students become more aware of graphotactics, exposing students read extensively, teaching the history of English language, improving students’ ability to recognize combinations of English letters, helping students understand the spelling system is logical and does follow rules, helping student investigate how the spelling system works, and involving students in linguistic investigations.

Week 4's (2/5/09) class: Jigsaw

I like this jigsaw activity very much. This is a cooperative game. At the very beginning of this class, we were divided into four groups, and each group was essential for the completion of a piece of IPA transcription which was assigned. We worked in our group first, and latter on, all of us were brought back to discuss and worked together as a whole team. Each group depended on all the other groups. It is definitely a good teaching technique which I can adopt and apply in my future classroom.

Week 4: Audiolingual Method (ALM)

On the chapter 2 of my APP, it is a contrastive study of phonemes in American English and Mandarin Chinese, and on my chapter 3, I was going to develop some lesson plans including exercise to give students practice with the phonetic errors or problem areas, which is based on my chapter 2. However, as I read on page 84, it is sad to know that audiolingual method (ALM) did not work well. I also looked up the Brown's book, and it seems that the popularity of ALM was not to last now. I’m now at the wit’s end of my chapter 3. I would appreciate it if I could hear some suggestion from you. Thank you.

Week 4: English Vowels & Consonants

It seems interesting to read the common topic “English vowels and consonants” twice from different authors. With the prior knowledge from the first reading, it was easy to read this time in spite that some phoneme symbols are used differently. To read from two authors' perspectives, it has bettered my understanding of the English phonology.

In Freeman & Freeman book, they basically divide vowels into three groups: short vowels, long vowels, and reduced vowels, and then go deep for each one. As for the consonants, the classifications are mostly same as Finegan. Besides, Finger refers to twenty-five consonants and twelve simple vowels with a Boston /a/ in their book while Freeman & Freeman include twenty-four consonants and fifteen vowels, including diphthongs. The consonant difference between Freeman & Freeman and Finegan is over the glottal /ʔ/, and it seems no numeral difference of vowels between them.