Data Analysis and Language Comparison Between English and Arabic

http://prezi.com/lzkm_ouf5uci/data-analysis-and-language-comparison/

Accents

In visiting each website, it was interesting to find out about dialects and how many dialects there really are. It proves that there is an English variance. Listening to the different dialects around North America, I noticed that there was a difference in the speed, pausing, tone, and intonation of the speakers. The vowel sounds were the same according to IPA, but seemed to be stressed at different spots of the words and this changes the accent from speaker to speaker. Some of the accents stressed consonant sounds at different places as well. I also noticed that there were a different amount of accents per state. For instance, Pennsylvania had 9 accents documented, Montana had 1, South Dakota had 1, New Hampshire had 4 and Texas had 16. I thought that was interesting and didn’t realize the variances in accents of each state. The accent game was comical for me because I only got 4 correct. It was interesting to hear the different accents and the one that surprised me the most was from South Africa! I didn’t expect that answer.

The video definitely disturbed me as an ESL teacher because I do feel that we are all humans. WE should all be able to walk in and buy something that we want as a consumer not based on the way we look or how we sound. It isn't anyone's job to assume that people are here illegally or legally and that seemed to be part of the issue. I think we are uninformed as Americans on the differences in cultures and it starts in our schools. I liked the response of the man who visited Mexico and said he was served even though he couldn’t speak Spanish. People need to be taught about other cultures and then maybe they will be more accepting of them. As a learning support teacher, I am advocating for the special needs population of students and parents. I feel as though I have a positive influence on others and it would not be different for my ELL students. I always think that we have rights in our country, but not rights to be rude to others based on their language, disability, race, culture, or gender, etc. We judge too much and accept too little as a society. I hope that our society soon changes into accepting others and following a teamwork motto of working together, not against each other. ELL’s need to have someone advocate for them and I have no problem in doing so.

The PBS websites were very resourceful of the information. I don't think I could show them to my primary ELL students, but if I told older students, I think it would ber very valuable to use in different group activities to derive class discussions with the students.

Conjunctions: Grammar Mini-Lesson

Please click on the first URL address in purple below to view my lesson.

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Unit 9

Topic 1:

Rewritten story:

Last winter, his brother bought and sold land. John wants to fish successfully. He painted and shined his boat, “Troubled Waters.” John asked his brother what he thought of the new look. His brother laughed and said, “You fish for compliments.” John did not argue with his brother. He made more nets to increase his catch for the next day.

The first sentence could be confusing because it introduces his brother into the story which really has nothing to do with his fishing. Then it is confusing because of when his brother bought and then sold the land. Although the past tense is used the sentence can still be confusing. The next sentence is confusing because it states that he loves fishing, but longs to be more successful, so which comes first? They are actually happening simultaneously. Then the reader can get confused with when John is actually feeling down and when he painted and shined the boat. At the end, his brother’s response is an idiom of him fishing for compliments. The reader may be confused with the difference between John actually fishing and wanting compliments from his brother. The other metaphors that can bring confusion to ELL students is the relationship between the boat’s name and John’s life along with what it means when the economy literally crashes.

The various verb tenses of switching from the present to the past is confusing for them throughout the entire story. By discussing with students and breaking a part the story line by line on a Smartboard, student’s may begin to increase their comprehension of it.

Topic 2:

John is a fisherman. (simple present)

_________________________________X_________________________________

                                                            NOW

He hasn’t had much luck catching fish in the past few weeks. (present past perfect)

X____________________________________________________________________

He is hoping to catch more fish tomorrow. (present progressive)

____________________________________________________________________X

I think grammar should be taught as a balance between the two thoughts. Betty Azar made the point that knowing a lot of grammar is not the point. It’s to create an interlanguage that is increasingly fluent and accurate in the use of English structures n meaningful communication. She stated that it can be integrated. I believe it can be integrated within reading and written texts. Keith Folse stated that errors are systematic and when students make these grammatical mistakes, it’s important to reflect back to the native language to answer why they are making this mistake. Teaching the particular student their mistakes in isolation is acceptable. This connects to what Michael Swan stated that grammar teaching does make a difference and to pick out what they need most and teach it. He also used his brother n law as an example for how he continues to have difficulty with English grammar and he has been listening to it for years. This proves that grammar also needs to be taught in isolation. However, we should teach it based upon the individual student’s needs to it. I personally teach grammar by using examples within a Daily Language Review on the student’s instructional level. It encompasses many parts of the language. This would be considered teaching it in isolation. However, within a reading or context text, I will often teach grammar skills integrated within the text as well. I think teaching should be balanced, and no one theory is 100% correct.

Dialog Miscommunication in #1 between Mrs. Rashid and Mrs. Thomas

One also miscommunication occurs when Mrs. Rashid answers, "He's very nice," after Mrs. thomas states, "I hear he is an excellent teacher." Excellent teacher and nice are different concepts. Being nice doesn't constitue being an excellent teacher. Mrs. Rashid is also causing another miscommunication by not staying relevant to the topic when asked, "Are you happy with the school district?" She answered about her neighborhood which included nothing about her feelings on the school. From Mrs. Rashid's repsonses, Mrs. Thomas may begin to feel and presume that Mrs. Rashid is not happy with the school district and did not hear that the teacher was excellent. However, based upon culture, Mrs. Rashid may feel that it is inappropriate to discuss school matters and teacher performance. It may be disrespecftul in her culture to discuss these publicly with others.

Chapter 8 Mind Map

Chapter 8 Mind Map

Created By: Jessica Shirk & Beth Neitz

O’Grady

End section of Chapter 6

Pragmatics~ a factor in sentence interpretation that includes:

∙Background attitudes and beliefs of the speaker and addressee

∙ The speaker and addressee’s understanding of context in which sentence is uttered

∙ The speaker and addressee’s knowledge of how language can be used to inform, persuade, mislead, and so forth.

I. Background Attitudes and Beliefs of the Speaker and Addressee

           

●Word Choice

∙Word choice effects sentence interpretation.

Example:

~The judge denied the prisoner’s request because he was cautious.

~The judge denied the prisoner’s request because he was dangerous.

*Although these two sentences have identical syntactic structures, they differ in the adjectives of cautious and dangerous. He is referred to differently in each sentence.  In the first sentence, he is referred to as the judge. In the second sentence, he is referred to as the prisoner.

*This happens because of our beliefs about how people act within our society.

●Presupposition

∙Assumption or belief implied by the use of a particular word or structure

            Example:

            ~Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

            ~Abraham Lincoln was murdered in 1865.

*The verb assassinated may give people an assumption that Abraham Lincoln was an important person. The verb murdered does not reflect a presupposition.

II. Setting

           

●Deictics

∙All languages have forms whose use and interpretation depend on the location of the speaker and/or hearer within a particular setting.

                        Examples:

                        ~this/that, here/there, come/go

*Without an understanding of how the setting in which a setting is uttered, it would be impossible for speakers of English to use or interpret these forms correctly.

III. Discourse

           

●Discourse

∙ connected series of utterances produced during a conversation, a lecture, a story, or other speech act.

∙the importance of discourse stems from the fact that individual sentences commonly include elements whose interpretation can only be determined with the help of information in preceding information

Example:

            ~The man is at the front door.

            ~A man is at the front door.

            *This contrasts the old information of someone whose already been mentioned in the discourse in the first sentence using the man to a man in the second sentence which refers to new information.

            ●Topics

                        ∙corresponds to what a sentence is about

IV. Grice’s Conversational Maxims

●”Rules for conversation”~ our understanding of how language is used in particular situations to convey a message.

●H. Paul Grice~The Cooperative Principle~make your contribution appropriate to the conversation

The Maxim of Relevance	Be relevant.
The Maxim of Quality	Try to make your contribution one that is true. (Do not say things that are false or for which you lack adequate evidence.)
The Maxim of Quantity	Do not make your contribution more or less informative than required.
The Maxim of Manner	Avoid ambiguity and obscurity; be brief and orderly.

Freeman & Freeman

Chapter 8

● How do readers make use of their knowledge of word parts as they read?

∙Word Recognition view

∙teachers encourage students to use phonics to help them identify words

∙some words are taught as sight words if they don’t follow phonics rules

∙structural analysis -longer words are taught by looking at morphemes that make up these words (looking for little words inside big words)

∙Sociopsycholinguistic view

∙teachers engage students in structural analysis in process of studying language from a scientific, linguistic perspective

∙students might try to develop word formation rules (prefixes/suffixes)

∙students may learn new vocabulary and gain insights to how language works

∙students apply this as they read

∙focus is on learning about language, not structural analysis

            ∙Difficulties in Applying Structural Analysis during Reading

                        ∙recognizing word parts

∙big words can contain little words, but little words aren’t actually meaning morphemes (ex. hot in hotel, quit in mosquito)

∙words are made up of meaningful parts, but it is difficult to decide which part of the word is a prefix and which part is the root  (ex. cognate= co (prefix) gnatus (root))

∙prefixes in English change its spelling depending on the first sound of the root word (ex. prefix -con can be spelled co, con, com, col, or cor)

∙variations in spelling make it difficult for students to recognize prefixes

∙even if a student recognizes the prefix, the meaning may not unlock meaning of the entire word

∙variations in spelling of word parts

                        ∙learning meanings of word parts

                                    ∙not all roots have the same difficulty level of learning them

∙ meanings of prefixes are easier to learn than the meanings of roots

∙some prefixes have more than one meaning which makes it difficult

∙suffixes serve primarily to indicate part of speech

∙difficult to pick at the parts of complex words

∙combining meanings of word parts to determine the meaning of a word

∙meaning of the whole word is often more than the sum of the meanings of the parts

∙going from a whole to part is easier than going from part to whole

∙meaning of parts together to come up with the meaning of the whole is difficult

            ●What is the best way to increase vocabulary

                        ∙Sociopsycholinguistic view

∙recognizing importance of building background knowledge for reading

∙engage students in extensive reading so that they can acquire word meanings as they encounter words in context (ex. SSR time of repeated encounters with words)

∙keep focus on concept development rather than learning vocabulary items

∙plan activities to help students build the concepts needed as background for reading

∙acquire more words through reading instead of direct teaching of vocabulary

                        ∙Hoyt (2002)

∙frontloading-involves learning about something, talking about it, wondering about it, and then reading and writing about it

∙helps in building background vocabulary

                        ∙Disadvantages of teaching from a word recognition view

∙include ineffective teaching practices such as pre-teaching vocabulary with teacher choosing words.

∙time being taken away from reading which proves to be the most successful way in increasing vocabulary

∙low numbers of words are learned through direct teaching of vocabulary

∙superficial knowledge gained by memorization

           

●What does it mean to know a word?

            ∙Linguistics perspective

∙involves having phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information of a word

            ∙phonological-recognize word in oral language and being able to pronounce the word

∙morphological-knowing inflectional and derivational affixes it combines with to produce complex words

∙syntactic-how a word functions in a sentence

∙semantic-defining a word, giving a synonym, extending or metaphorically giving meanings of words, knowing other words related to the word, and the level of generality of the different words

∙pragmatic-real world use of the word

∙Krashen 2003 Natural Order Hypothesis-grammatical morphemes are acquired in a fixed order. The order depends on the language being learned rather than the native language of the learner.

            ●How can teachers help English Learners acquire academic vocabulary?

                                   

∙teacher’s who understand morphology are better prepared to help ELL develop academic vocabulary

∙teachers should have the knowledge that ELL acquire conversational English in about two years and academic English takes much longer to acquire, at least five years

∙teacher’s can make academic content comprehensible

∙use number of strategies to help students comprehend academic text

∙activate or build background knowledge

∙preview text

∙teacher teaches ways to use graphic organizers to represent key ideas

∙involve them in extensive reading

∙read content area text which include academic vocabulary

∙teachers should teach content specific and general academic vocabulary through the study of cognates – words that come from the same root, that were literally “born together”

∙teachers should make older students aware of linguistic features of text (Linguistic Text Analysis)

           

                                   

Pinker

Chapter 8: Tower of Babel

            ●Chapter title comes from the story in Genesis.

●There are different views as to the English language differs from other languages.

            Chomsky claims that humans speak the same language. Pinker explains how English differs from other languages. Some most conspicuous ways that language can be different from what we use in English are:

1.)    English is an “isolating” language, which builds sentences by rearranging immutable word-sized units.

2.)    English is a “fixed-word order” language where each phrase has a fixed position.

3.)    English is an “accusative” language where the subject of an intransitive verb is treated identically to the subject of a transitive verb and different from the object from the transitive verb.

4.)    English is a “subject-prominent” language in which all sentences must have a subject.

5.)    English is an “SVO” language, with the order subject-verb-object.

6.)    In English, a noun can name a thing in any construction.

●Even though there are differences in languages, one can hear striking universals through the babble.

●One possibility is that language originated only once, and all existing languages are the descendants of that proto-language and retain some of its features. These features would be similar across the languages for the same reason that alphabetical order is similar across the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic Alphabets.

●Differences among languages, like differences among species, are the effects of three processes acting over long spans of time. The processes are linguistic innovation in the case of languages, heredity, and isolation.

●The effects of innovation, learning, and migration connect to different languages.

● Changes can arise from many sources:

                        -words are coined

                        -borrowed from other languages

                        -stretched in meaning

                        -forgotten

●The brain is equipped with a universal grammar and is always on the lookout for examples in ambient speech of various kinds of rules.

●Though people modify their language every generation, the extent of these changes is slight; vastly more sounds are preserved than mutated more constructions analyzed properly than reanalyzed.

●Languages are perpetuated by the children who learn them.  When linguist see a language spoken only by adults, they know it’s doomed.

●Pinker quotes Ken Hale-“The loss of a language is part of the more general loss being suffered by the world, the loss of diversity in all things.”

           

Grice's Conversational Maxim Examples

Relevance: (in person conversation)

Bailee (daughter): How long until the picnic?

Me as the parent: It’s clean up time now.

I didn’t answer her question which violated the Maxim of Relevance. My tone was very affirmative and sarcastic which makes my body language negative. I used the linguistic signal of pointing to what I wanted her to clean so I signaled a change in conversation.

Quality: (telephone conversation)

Heather: How are you doing today?

Me as a friend: Great.

I didn’t answer truthful when she was asking me which violated the Maxim of Quality. Since I knew she was having a great day from the previous conversation prior to her question, I was not truthful. I did respond in a sarcastic manner for the sake of politeness.

Quantity: (in person conversation)

Nicole (friend visiting) Where is the nearest gas station?

Me: up the street

I violated the Maxim of Quantity because I did not respond with an informative response to her question. I also responded with a sarcastic tone along with humorous. I also pointed with a flailing hand up the street with my verbal response and moved my head with a somewhat jerk.

Manner: (in person conversation)

Me: When are you going to finish this kitchen project that was started a year ago?

Husband: When someone is done taking classes, since projects have been put on hold for that.

My husband violated the Maxim of Manner because he is being obscure as to when he is really going to finish the project. He was using sarcasm, but trying to be humorous at the same time and serious with his tone and negative body language. He is also being ambiguous on who that person is, but obviously as the addressee, I knew who he was implying about.