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.”