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.

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.

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.

Intelligent English writing system based on fusion of herding effect and artificial intelligence

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Liu Guifang
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Training System ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Traditional Teaching ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Herd Effect ◽  
College English ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Relative Attractiveness ◽  
Information Sharing Mechanism

The use of intelligent college English writing training system will certainly promote the traditional teaching structure and realize a new and efficient English writing teaching mode. On the basis of machine learning and the herd effect algorithm, this article constructs an artificial intelligence-based English intelligent writing system. Moreover, in view of the shortcomings of traditional models and the characteristics of intelligent English writing, this paper proposes an improved algorithm for optimization of swarm particle walking paths. In addition, this article proposes a relative attractiveness to initialize the formation of small-scale groups based on the herd effect. Then, in the process of intelligent writing, by establishing an information sharing mechanism between groups, each group is continuously updated and reorganized according to the relative attractiveness of the group, so that the writing process can be simulated more realistically. From the experimental research, it can be seen that the model constructed in this paper has a certain degree of intelligence.

“She Doesn’t Have the Basic Understanding of a Language”: Using Spelling Research to Challenge Deficit Conceptualizations of Adolescent Bilinguals

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maneka Deanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Language Arts ◽  
English Language ◽  
Home School ◽  
Writing System ◽  
English Learner ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Basic Understanding ◽  
English Spelling

This article examines the alternative English spelling practices of a student who is considered to be a long-term English learner. It draws on a theoretical framework that integrates a social perspective on spelling with a rejection of idealized conceptions of bilingualism. The analyzed English spellings presented in this article were identified in eight texts that the focal student composed during her English language arts class. Notably, this examination was contextualized within the focal student’s linguistic and schooling history. The resulting findings document that the focal student was a simultaneous bilingual who had a troubled history with formal schooling—the place where many young people learn spelling conventions. The predominant practice that characterized her alternative spellings was her use of conventional English sound-to-letter relationships to create a written echo of the speech patterns of her home, school, and community. When her alternative spelling did not reflect these Englishes, they typically illustrated her familiarity with the normative spelling of particular words. Yet the practices that characterized her spelling meant that they strayed from accepted conventions (e.g., transposition/omission/insertion of letters). The focal student’s alternative spelling practices illustrated her familiarity with the English writing system and the depth of her knowledge of multiple Englishes.

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.

The need for addressing multilingualism, ambiguity and interoperability for visual resources management across metadata platforms

First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Russo ◽  
Abebe Rorissa
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Significant Percentage ◽  
Resources Management ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Visual Resource Management ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Image Metadata ◽  
Visual Resource

The digitization of visual resources and the creation of corresponding metadata that meets the criteria of clarity and interoperability, while also approaching the needs of the multilingual Web, are pressing concerns. Because visual resources make up a significant percentage of digital information, this paper focuses on the aforementioned concerns and proposes ways to address them, including swift progression and adoption of cohesive, multi-user, multilingual metadata standardization to improve digital access and to allow all descriptive image metadata to be approachable and translatable. We offer some recommendations such as those involved in visual resource management moving away from using primarily the English writing system based metadata schemas in order to provide flexible lexicon in non-Roman languages, which can easily be recognized and interpreted by both monolingual and multilingual users alike as well as facilitate digital metadata interoperability.

scholarly journals Effect of Phoneme Awareness Instruction on Kindergarten Children's Invented Spelling

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlene M. Tangel ◽  
Benita A. Blachman
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Kindergarten Children ◽  
Phoneme Awareness ◽  
Invented Spelling ◽  
Phoneme Segmentation ◽  
Developmental Spelling ◽  
Spelling Test ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Letter Sound ◽  
City Schools

The purpose of this study was to determine if children trained in phoneme awareness in kindergarten would differ in invented spelling from children who did not have this training. A reliable scoring system was created to evaluate the invented spelling of the kindergarten children. The children were selected from 18, all-day kindergartens in four, demographically comparable low-income, inner-city schools. Prior to the intervention, the 77 treatment children and the 72 control children did not differ in age, sex, race, PPVT-R, phoneme segmentation, letter name and letter sound knowledge, or word recognition. During March, April, and May of the kindergarten year, treatment children participated in an 11-week phoneme awareness intervention that included instruction in letter names and sounds. After the intervention, the treatment children significantly outperformed the control children in phoneme segmentation, letter name and sound knowledge, and reading phonetically regular words and nonwords. Of primary interest in this study is the fact that the treatment children produced invented spellings that were rated developmentally superior to those of the control children. The 7-point scale created for scoring the developmental spelling test was found to be highly reliable using either correlation ( r = .98) or percent of agreement (93%).

A Theoretical Analysis of the Effects of Writing System Characteristics on Learning to Read

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Gillooly
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Verbal Learning ◽  
Behavioral Effects ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Mediation Processes ◽  
System Characteristics

This paper summarizes the work of those seeking to analyze English orthography as well as the data which bear on the behavioral effects of writing system characteristics. English writing is shown to involve at least two levels of representation. One level is sound-related (phonographic representation) but another, deeper level of representation is meaning-related (orthographic representation). The results of this analysis are combined with verbal learning models in order to explain the experimental data. Reading is viewed as involving mediation processes which depend, in part, on reading experience. Hence, the effects of increased reading experience involve not only changes in the functional stimuli for reading as Gibson has proposed but also changes in the nature of the responses to those stimuli. The implications of this notion are discussed briefly.

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