Spelling of Words

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
The Other ◽  
Writing System ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Simple Classification ◽  
English System ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Level Of Analysis

In studying the first graders’ spellings, it is reasonable to begin at the simplest possible level of analysis. The most basic way to look at the children's spellings is at the level of whole words. At this level, the simplest possible question is whether a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly. Once children’s spellings are classified as correct or incorrect, a number of questions arise. Are some words easier for children to spell correctly than others? If so, what kinds of words are easy to spell and what kinds of words are hard to spell? The answers to these questions should shed light on the difficulties that children face in learning the English writing system. For example, if children have more trouble on irregular words than on regular words, one could suggest that the irregularity of the English system is one source of difficulty in learning to spell. If children often misspell inflected and derived words, one could suggest that the morphological basis of the English writing system is a problem for first graders. Such issues are addressed in the first section of this chapter. Although it is easy to classify children’s spellings of whole words as correct or incorrect, this simple classification may obscure potentially important information. For example, although KARE is the wrong spelling of care, this error is a plausible rendition of the word's spoken form. The letter k is a reasonable rendering of the phoneme /k/; /k/ is spelled as k in words like kite and king. In the terms introduced in Chapter 1, KARE is a legal misspelling of care. On the other hand, CA is an illegal spelling of care. It contains no representation of the /r/. In this chapter, I take a first step beyond the correct/incorrect distinction by classifying errors on whole words as legal or illegal. I ask whether some kinds of words give rise to more legal errors than other words and why. Legal errors are not all alike. They differ from one another in a number of ways, one of which is how easy they are to decipher.

Vowels

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Invented Spelling ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Conventional System ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Vowel Phoneme

In this chapter, I focus on vowel phonemes. Because a study that is strictly based on a distinction between legal and illegal spellings has some serious problems, this chapter employs a more descriptive and qualitative approach. I discuss how the first graders in the study spelled each vowel phoneme of English. What do the children’s spellings reveal about their knowledge of the English writing system and about their knowledge of spoken English? The analyses reported in Chapter 3 uncovered some factors that affect how children spell phonemes. For the children in this study, the most important of these factors was exposure to phoneme-grapheme correspondences in printed words: Children used frequent correspondences more often than infrequent correspondences. Another factor was letter names: Children used correspondences in which the name of the grapheme contained the phoneme more often than correspondences in which the name of the grapheme did not contain the phoneme. A third factor was formal teaching: Children were more often correct on correspondences that were taught in the classroom than on correspondences that were not directly taught. In this chapter, I ask how these and other factors influenced the children’s spelling of specific vowel phonemes. Sometimes, the children’s choices of spellings for vowel phonemes mirrored the choices embodied in the English writing system. The children used the spellings that occur most frequently in English, whether or not these spellings were explicitly taught. In other cases, the children’s choices did not mirror the conventional ones. There are two different ways in which this occurred. First, the children sometimes used a spelling that is illegal in the conventional system; that is, a grapheme that never represents the phoneme. In these cases, something other than knowledge of conventional spelling must explain the “invented” spelling. I ask what the reasons are. In discussing these illegal substitutions, I have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, a cut-off of 2.5%. Illegal substitutions that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more out of all spellings are singled out for discussion. A second way in which children’s choices sometimes failed to mirror those of conventional English was in overuse of particular spellings.

Inflected and Derived Words

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Inflected Form ◽  
Derivational Morphemes

In this chapter, I discuss the first graders’ spellings of inflected and derived words. The children in this study often misspelled inflected words (Chapter 2). One type of error that has already been documented is the omission of inflectional endings like the /s/ of books (Chapter 8). This chapter considers the children’s spellings of inflected and derived words in more detail. Before beginning the discussion, some definitions and examples are in order. In English, inflections are added to the ends of words to mark such things as tense and number. For example, helped contains the verb stem help plus the past tense inflectional suffix. I refer to the past tense suffix as -D. Helped contains two morphemes or units of meaning, help and -D. The inflected word books also contains two morphemes, the stem book and the plural suffix -Z. As these examples show, the addition of an inflectional suffix does not change a word’s part of speech. Derivations differ in several ways from inflections. For one thing, English derivational morphemes may be either prefixes or suffixes. One derivational prefix is re-, which may be added to the verb read to form reread. Derivational suffixes include -ion and -ly. Unlike inflections, derivations may change a word’s part of speech. For example, the noun vacation is derived from the verb vacate by the addition of-ion; the adjective facial is derived from the noun face by the addition of -ial. The relation in meaning between a stem and a derived form is often less transparent than the relation in meaning between a stem and an inflected form. For instance, one cannot predict the full meaning of vacation from the meaning of its parts. As discussed in Chapter 1, the spellings of inflected and derived words in English often represent the words’ morphemic forms rather than their phonemic forms. For example, the past tense suffix is /t/ in words like helped, whose stem ends with a voiceless consonant, but /d/ in words like cleaned, whose stem ends with a voiced consonant. The phonemic forms of stems, too, sometimes change when inflectional or derivational morphemes are added.

Spelling of Phonemes: Correct Spellings, Legal Substitutions, and Illegal Substitutions

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
Traditional View ◽  
Writing System ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Correct Spelling ◽  
Spoken Words

So far, I have examined children’s spellings at the level of whole words. The results show that children have more difficulty with some kinds of words than others. For example, children often misspell words that contain multiple-letter graphemes, words such as that and sang. Children often misspell irregular words, words such as said and come. One would guess that th is the trouble spot in that and ai is the trouble spot in said. However, because the analyses presented so far are confined to whole words, I cannot say for sure. To determine which parts of words are difficult to spell, I must move from the level of whole words to the level of individual phonemes and individual graphemes. The need to examine children’s spellings at the level of phonemes and graphemes stems from the nature of the English writing system itself. As discussed in Chapter 1, the English writing system is basically alphabetic. Although most phonemes may be spelled in more than one way, there are relations between phonemes and graphemes. For instance, /k/ may be spelled with k, as in key, c, as in care, or ck, as in back, among other possibilities. Adults cannot always choose the correct spelling from among these possibilities, but we know that /k/ could never be written with m or b. Our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences tells us that Carl or Karl are reasonable renditions of the spoken form /k’arl/ but that Marl is not. Traditionally, it was thought that children learn to spell on a visual basis, by memorizing the sequence of letters in each word. In this view, children treat printed words as wholes. They do not learn relations between the parts of printed words (graphemes) and the parts of spoken words (phonemes). The traditional view further implies that children memorize one word at a time. They do not learn relations between sounds and spellings that apply to many different words. Findings reported in Chapter 2 suggest that this traditional view of learning to spell is incorrect For example, children's difficulty on irregular words like said and come suggests that children learn about the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes.

10. Skills for Success in Coursework Assessments

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Foster
Keyword(s):  
Competition Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eu Law ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Undergraduate Level ◽  
Procedural Law ◽  
European Universities ◽  
Substantive Law

In Chapter 1, some of the different or special considerations of EU were outlined. In some of the other chapters, I indicated certain questions, which due to their nature might be suitable as coursework questions. In this chapter, I will provide some guidance in tackling EU coursework questions. It may be that coursework is a percentage or in some cases the whole assessment for your EU law module. In my experience, having been an internal or external EU law examiner in about 20 UK and European Universities, word limits can also vary but depending on the percentage value carried, may be just 2,000 words up to 7,500 for undergraduate coursework. 10,000 words cannot be ruled out, but would be the exception. Some coursework questions will be in the form of an essay-style question and some will be in the form of a problem. The problem questions are likely to be composite questions but are unlikely in EU law to be fully mixed questions involving both procedural law and substantive law, although it is not ruled out; there are over 100 law schools out there and they can vary considerably in their coursework requirements. In EU law, I have observed that longer coursework questions tend to concentrate either on one involving a number of procedural actions, or on specific substantive subjects such as the free movement of goods or persons, competition law, or discrimination law. The questions at undergraduate level are more likely to be set questions, but longer word limits might alternatively involve you in choosing your own topic....

Concluding Remarks

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
Susan D. Healy
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Location ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Test ◽  
Fitness Benefits ◽  
Multiple Species ◽  
Human Brains ◽  
Shed Light

In this chapter, I conclude that ecology has been shown to explain variation in the size of brain regions in multiple species, which is not the case for any of the other hypotheses. I go on to suggest the steps that need to be taken to collect the requisite data: collecting data on size of brain regions with identifiable function, choosing the appropriate cognitive test and collecting data from appropriate species, better quantification of ecological factors along with data collected from individuals that differ in age, sex, and geographical location, and demonstration that better cognition confers fitness benefits. Each of these is in both principle and practice feasible, if challenging to assemble for one hypothesis/taxonomic group. With these data, we may eventually be able to shed light on what has caused human brains to become relatively large.

Consonants

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Standard System ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Conventional System ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
English System ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Omission Errors

Learning to spell involves learning about the relations between the phonemes of the spoken language and the graphemes of the printed language. In Chapter 4, I asked how children learn these relations for vowels. The results showed that a number of factors affect children’s learning, including their exposure to printed words, their knowledge of letter names, and their phonological systems. In this chapter, I turn to consonants. I ask whether these same factors affect children’s spelling of consonants. This chapter focuses on substitution errors and, to a lesser extent, correct spellings. Consonant omission errors will be considered in detail in Chapter 8. Sometimes, the first graders’ most common spellings of consonant phonemes were those spellings that are most frequent in the conventional English system. However, the children’s spellings did not always mirror those of conventional English. The children sometimes used a grapheme that never represents the phoneme in the standard system; that is, an illegal spelling. As in Chapter 4, I focus on illegal spellings that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more. I ask why the children selected that particular grapheme to represent the phoneme. In other cases, the students used a legal spelling significantly more often than expected given its frequency in the conventional system. Again, factors other than exposure to the relations between phonemes and graphemes in English words must be responsible for the error. I ask what these factors are. As in Chapter 4, I use binomial tests to compare the frequencies of correspondences in children’s spelling to the frequencies of the correspondences in the conventional spellings of the same words. In this section, the children’s spellings of various consonant phonemes are discussed. The reader may find it helpful to refer to the consonant chart of Figure 1.5 when reading this section. The stop consonants of English are /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In discussing how the children spelled these consonants, I will first consider the children’s spellings without regard to the contexts in which the consonants occurred. Next, I will discuss some errors that occurred for stop consonants in particular contexts.

A Politics of Intensity: Some Aspects of Acceleration in Simondon and Deleuze

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-517
Author(s):  
Yuk Hui ◽  
Louis Morelle
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
The Other ◽  
Generic Concept ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Ontological Ground ◽  
Shed Light

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.

An Error Analysis of Hiragana and Katakana Writing Systems in the Learning of Japanese as Third Language at UiTM

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Norhazlina Husin ◽  
Nuranisah Tan Abdullah ◽  
Aini Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
The Other ◽  
Japanese Language ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Main Challenge

Abstract The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students has its own issues and challenges. It does not merely involve only teaching the four language skills. Japanese language has its own unique values. These unique values also tend to differentiate the teaching of Japanese language as a third language from other third language acquisitions. The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students also involves the teaching of its writing system. This makes the teaching of Japanese language rather complicated because Japanese language has three forms of writings, namely: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Students are required to fully understand the Hiragana system of writing first before proceeding to learn the other two forms of writings. The main challenge in the teaching of Japanese writing systems is the time allocated that can be considered as very limited as other language aspects need to be taught too. This, which relates directly to students’ factor very much contribute to the challenges foreseen. Students are likely to face problems in understanding and using the writings as they simultaneously need to adhere to the findings teaching and learning schedules. This article discusses on the analysis conducted in terms of the learning of the Hiragana and Katagana systems of writing among foreign students. The discussion in this article is based on the teaching of Japanese language to students of Universiti Teknologi MARA(UiTM), Shah Alam. Keywords: Third language, Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji

The Power of Nature in the High North

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trude Fonneland
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Shed Light

In this chapter, I explore shamans’ relationships with the nature of the high north. How is nature included in their practices and how does the use of nature relate to the legitimizing of modern Sámi shamanism? I base the discussion on the view that landscapes are constituted as meaningful entities through events. However, different experiences, interests, and agendas make the same landscape evolve with different meanings. To shed light on these issues, I start by putting in context some of the background for the interest in nature and landscape that is expressed by the shamans I have interviewed and that can be related to the interest in nature among modern Pagans as well as within the New Age spiritualties.

Doctrine and Dialectic in Plato’s Dialogues

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachana Kamtekar
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Set Up

Chapter 1 lays out the methodological approach employed throughout the book, which is to pay attention to the dialectical dependence of what the main speaker in the dialogue says on the intellectual problem(s) set up in the dialogue both by himself and the other speakers. To illustrate, Chapter 1 describes Socrates’ use of the method of hypotheses from the Meno and Phaedo to answer questions that go beyond his claims to knowledge in the Republic.

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