The phono-morph war

A report about research from Portsmouth University in the Southern Daily Echo suggests that a new approach to literacy teaching, which involves teaching about the structures and meanings of words (morphology) is more effective than the sound system based teaching of phonics that has been promoted over the last decade.

With a morphological approach, children are taught about the units that make up words (like we've been doing in Child Language recently with morphemes like -s, -ed, -ing , -er, -ist and -est):

Dr Victoria Devonshire, of the Department of Psychology, trialled a new method of teaching reading and writing with 120 children aged five to seven and found the average reading age increased by 14 months after just six months. She said: ''We were surprised at how compelling the results were.
''When children were taught to understand why English works the way it does, we saw a leap in their ability to learn to read and write.

''The written word is about conveying meaning, not the sound of speech. Expecting children to just figure out the rules of our language is worryingly common and it isn't helping them become as proficient and confident as young children in many other languages.'' 

Phonics has been promoted by successive governments as a  means of rapidly improving children's ability to decode the sounds of English, but it's come in for some stick because - as we can all see with words like plough, through and cough - the spelling system in English isn't regular or even very logical. The introduction of phonics testing at Key Stage 1, where nonsense words like wib or vog (or even our old favourite, wug) are given to children to read has provoked yet more concern among many literacy experts, because - they argue - it's articifial and pointless to give children made-up words out of context when readign is not just about individual sounds or words, but about making sense of words and sounds in their specific contexts.

The fact that some people who are quite close to government advisors are set to make a few quid out of phonics schemes is also a cause for scepticism among critics of the phonics-or-bust approach, but plenty of research suggests that phonics can help some children; the argument is not really about if it does but how and why and also in which contexts.

So, what about teaching morphology as this research suggests? It's not necessarily a new approach; back in 2006, Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant published Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes, which looked at work done in schools to promote the study of morphology as a means of improving spelling and reading. What Victoria Devonshire is doing sounds really interesting and it sounds like it will add another dimension to literacy teaching. Hopefully, there'll be more information about this approach to come out.

Click here

We've recently been covering children's acquisition of the sounds of English in AS classes, and I made a passing reference to how very young children can make any sound in any language (like the clicks of Xhosa in South Africa) but gradually tune in to their mother tongue as they grow older.

This fascinating post by Julie Sedivy in Discover magazine tells us a lot more about Xhosa and its clicks but also makes a number of interesting points about how we perceive sounds. Sedivy points out that to an outsider, the clicks of Xhosa sound "a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other". Of course, to a Xhosa speaker, the sounds are as familiar as t,s, and d are to English speakers.

In terms of children's acquisition of sounds, the article raises some good points to consider. We often treat the phonological part of a child's language development as mostly to do with the production of sounds and patterns of "errors" in those sounds (deletion, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, for example), at least I know I do when I teach it. But what about how we hear sounds as children and how we process those sounds and create a mental representation of what they mean?

Sedivy tells us that "your brain cares as much about how sounds function in a language than about their actual physical properties, so the same acoustic input can be interpreted very differently by the brain depending on its role in a language", so when toddlers are listening to speech all around them, they're not just parroting or imitating it, but making sense of how sounds are used, where they appear and what they might mean. It's as much to do with fathoming out meanings as it is to do with trying to replicate the production of the sound.

I walk, I walked, I text, I texed?

There's some interesting discussion on David Crystal's blog about the past tense of the verb to text. In his post, Crystal mentions that the word existed as a verb way back in the 16th Century, long before the appearance of mobile phones and SMS, but back then it had a regular -ed inflection.

More recently, people have begun to notice how the past tense has started to appear as texed rather than texted, and Crystal suggests that this might be down to the xt consonant cluster at the end and how we react when an -ed past tense is tacked onto it:

Indeed, there is evidence from the history of English that the 'xt' pronunciation is actually easier than some alternatives, as when we see asked change to axed in many regional dialects. But adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic. We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted, and that could motivate people to drop the ending. Speakers generally prefer shorter forms.

John Wells, UCL's guru of phonetics, also addressed the issue of the phonology of texted/texed in this blog post a while back.

What strikes me as interesting about this is that - as Crystal points out - so many new words seem to follow regular patterns of inflection. You can pretty much bet your house on new verbs taking -ed in the past tense, so it's odd to see irregular inflections appearing like this and interesting that it's linked to phonology.

What would be the chances of a new noun taking an irregular plural ending like -en (as we have with older words from previous centuries -  children, oxen, brethren)?