41–50 of 63 posts
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And, of course, the main reason we have spelling bees is that people enjoy them.
But they are only possible because the phonetic rules of English are far from consistent
What I would like very much is a 'runbook' of techniques in pedagogy. I've read a couple of the books in the space hoping for something and it seems like all of them have philosophical content. The Intentional Teacher is generally pretty good with motivating examples and underlying theory but I'm just looking for a large number of techniques. If anyone has things to share on this front I'd appreciate hearing. I imagi…
Practical pedagogy is called didactics and primary school teachers (should) learn a lot of it: after all, a child's brain is still quite undeveloped and you cannot teach them like you would teach a peer or yourself. E.g. you cannot teach grammar rules but you can teach a foreign language through singing, learning games etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didactic_method These approaches work for most children most of…
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There is a reason why German kids don't have spelling bees.
And, of course, the main reason we have spelling bees is that people enjoy them.
People who spell words wrong in Spanish are either on the one hand mixing up "k" and "que," "b" and "v," maybe screwing up "c" with "k," "s" and "que" or forgetting the accent placement rules; or on the other hand they've literally heard and said the word incorrectly all their lives.
Also, even the misspellings in Spanish will 99.9% result in perfect pronunciation. The accent rules are just about where you're allowed to omit it, or when you add it to a one-syllable word and it doesn't actually indicate an accent. The error you're most likely to make is to put one in when it is unnecessary.
> For decades, the common explanation for why children struggle to read has stayed remarkably consistent. Smart kids read well. Kids who don't simply aren't smart enough.
This strikes me as something that was debunked in the 60s. Ascribing reading ability to intelligence seems like the most fatalistic thought terminating idea one can have.
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And, of course, the main reason we have spelling bees is that people enjoy them.
In Western alphabetic languages other than French, English, and Portuguese, not being able to spell the word is virtually identical to not knowing how to say the word. People who spell words wrong in Spanish are either on the one hand mixing up "k" and "que," "b" and "v," maybe screwing up "c" with "k," "s" and "que" or forgetting the accent placement rules; or on the other hand they've literally heard and said the w…
I do have a bit of a pet peeve on the stance that English doesn't have a phonetic orthography. It absolutely does. To teach kids otherwise is a massive disservice to the kids.
It is easy to think that all of the exceptions to how things work in English are problematic. The catch, of course, is that many of them are specifically used as fun games to play with the words.
To me, it is the equivalent of planned city centers versus organic variants. Reality is almost certainly that both can work. And there will be preference of folks between the two.
This has been the mainstream understanding of dyslexia since the 1990s. "Since the 1990s, the phonological deficit hypothesis has been the dominant explanation favored by researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_deficit_hypothesi...
It's always seemed crazy to me when people talk about "the cause" of dyslexia. There are so many brain processes involved in reading, that any number of issues could be a cause of someone's dyslexia. It's like saying "the cause" of water drainage issues is beavers.
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But they are only possible because the phonetic rules of English are far from consistent
This feels like a strong reason to keep both, to me. People enjoy them, and they enable fun games. :D
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Teaching requires simulating the thought process and emotional state of learners. And then modelling the appropriate thought process to them, repairing their misunderstanding, and managing their cognitive load and other emotions. Outside of relatively narrow domains, I'm not sure a runbook makes any sense here. People are not, in this sense, machines.
Thank you for responding. My experience is different. A friend of mine shared an anecdote of his daughter not differentiating between two of something and three of something. Her grandfather, visiting from far away, is a child psychologist and after a short while with her and the right methods she reliably did so. The methods themselves weren't magic or highly tuned. They were actually a selection from a recipe book…
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Of course, you don't have to believe me; you could also read about the orthographic depth of English vs other languages on Wikipedia or something. "In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: from the rules of pronunciation, one is able to pronounce the word correctly.[1] That is to say, shallow (transparent) orthographies, also called phonemic orthographies, have a one-to-one relationship…
From the intro of the page you link: "The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence." So, sure, if you want to discuss about how English orthography is deep, go for it. I won't even really disagree. Quite the contrary. The opening claim was that it wasn't phonetic, though. That is a different thing. It…
Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule.
I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we say the "ll" almost like a English "sh" instead or an English "lee".
The other day I was joking with my wife, and I told her that to make the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin:
v -> f
w -> v
ei -> ia [in English, something like "ee ah"]
ie -> ii [in English, something like "ee ee"]
eu -> oi [in English, something like "oh ee"]
sch -> sh [loaned from English, perhaps "y" in pure Spanish but it's confusing]
I can't imagine how to do a similar table in English, at least a table that enters in a napkin. Let's start with the infamous case of "yesterday" does it sound like "today" or "Friday"? How is the rule? Can you classify all the words in this table https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/all/... ?