Tuesday, February 24, 2009

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.

2 comments:

  1. That's one advantage of non native speaking teacher that we can teach based on our own learning experience ;)

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  2. I agree; our own language learning experiences are very important to our teaching. Even for me, as an "SLL" - Spanish Language Learner. :)

    And that influence can be positive or negative. We can learn from both our good language learning experiences as well as the bad ones. The bad experiences can help us know what NOT to do.

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