Phonics

Phonics is an instructional method for teaching children to read English, involving teaching children to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters (e.g., the sound /t/ can be replaced with t, or te spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words. Children begin learning to read using phonics usually around the age of 5 or 6.

Teaching English reading using phonics requires children to learn the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Phonics instruction requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of information about phonics rules, or patterns.

Basic rules:

1. Alphabetic principle

From a linguistics perspective, English spelling is based on the alphabetic principle. In an alphabetic writing system, letters are used to represent speech sounds, or phonemes. For example, the word pat is spelled with three letters, p, a, and t, each representing a phoneme, respectively, /p/, /æ/, and /t/.

In many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. But the spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions.

Although the patterns are inconsistent, when English spelling rules take into account syllable structure, phonetics, and accents, there are dozens of rules that are 75% or more reliable.

2. Vowel phonics patterns

---Short vowels, named so because they are not diphthongs like the long vowels, are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. The term "short vowel" does not mean that they are pronounced for a particularly short period of time.

---Long vowels are synonymous with the names of the single letter vowels, such as /eɪ/ in baby, /iː/ in meter, /aɪ/ in tiny, /oʊ/ in broken, and /juː/ in humor. In classrooms, long vowels sounds are taught as being "the same as the names of the letters."

---Schwa is an indistinct sound of a vowel in an unstressed syllable, represented by the linguistic symbol ə. /ə/ is the sound made by the o in lesson. it is not always taught to elementary school students because it is difficult to understand.

---Closed syllables are syllables in which a single vowel letter is followed by a consonant.

---Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end of the syllable.

---Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel sounds. English has four common diphthongs, including /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, and /juː/.

---Vowel digraphs are those spelling patterns wherein two letters are used to represent the vowel sound. The ai in sail is a vowel digraph. Because the first letter in a vowel digraph sometimes says its long vowel sound, as in sail, some phonics programs once taught that "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." This convention has been almost universally discarded, owing to the many non-examples. The au spelling of the /ɔː/ sound and the oo spelling of the /uː/ and /ʊ/ sounds do not follow this pattern.

---Vowel-consonant-E spellings are those wherein a single vowel letter, followed by a consonant and the letter e makes the long vowel sound. Examples of this include bake, theme, hike, cone, and cute. (The ee spelling, as in meet is sometimes considered part of this pattern.)

3. Consonant phonics patterns

---Consonant digraphs are those spellings wherein two letters are used to represent a consonant phoneme. The most common consonant digraphs ch for /tʃ/, ng for /ŋ/, ph for /f/, sh for /ʃ/, th for /θ/ and /ð/, and wh for /ʍ/ (often pronounced /w/ in American English). Letter combinations like wr for /r/ and kn for /n/ are also consonant digraphs, although these are sometimes considered patterns with "silent letters."

---Short vowel+consonant patterns involve the spelling of the sounds /k/ as in peek, /dʒ/ as in stage, and /tʃ/ as in speech. These sounds each have two possible spellings at the end of a word, ck and k for /k/, dge and ge for /dʒ/, and tch and ch for /tʃ/.

Sight words and high frequency words:

---There are words that do not follow these phonics rules, such as were, who, and you. They are often called "sight words" because they must be memorized by sight.

---Teachers who use phonics also often teach students to memorize the most high frequency words in English, such as it, he, them, and when.

Mindmap Building

This week we were talking about CMC（Computer-mediated communication）and LMS（Learning-management system）. The most distinct difference between them is that LMS, beside asynchronous system, has synchronous function, including BBS, MSN, Skype , online chat rooms etc. Also, we were taught to use the Mindmap to form a structure according to what we know about CALL class. We can make a simple mindmap on www.text2mindmap.com, or down load Freemind installer from www.resourceforge.net.

I created a mindmap at home last week, but it is a pity that I saw some mistakes there but I’m unable to redo the picture because I cannot find where to down load the installer again. So I would like to make necessary corrections here. The problem is on the yellow branch named LESSON; the first fault is “C” of the title “Conveniency of computer” on the first middle branch is hidden. The second one is that the title “synchronous” and its content are completely wrong that they should be replaced with the title “asynchronous” which content would be alike as those in the branch of LMS.

To sum up, building a mindmap is really interesting and educational. Learners could reorganize the stuff they have learned while they are making a mindmap, and teacher could show a clear construction of the concept he/she wants to teach. I think people who use minkmap in their study could learn to rectify their thinking step by step and strengthen their memorization, so I highly recommend learners and teacher to apply this amazing tool in learning.

What a Computer Do 4 Us

We were talking about whether a computer was a must in language teaching last week, and the answer is “no.” A computer is just becoming normalized in our lives, and the role of that has changed from the tutor to tool and medium. We also have some distinctive features about what a computer can do for the language class, especially in correcting work.

By listing those terms in two catalogues, it would be obvious how a computer works for students’ learning. A computer could provide the function of distant learning, authentic-information conveyance, task persistence, judging predetermined answers, immediate and fixed feedback, and recordation. On the other hand, a computer could not give us unexpected input, individual feedback, interactive teaching, face to face negotiation and meeting, and engage depth and quality of learning.

In my opinion, I agree with the content in paragraph 1. Computer-based learning is important nowadays, but not a must. A computer alone is like a stockroom, and we can just use the software and the knowledge filled in it. But now, as long as we have it online, most of the difficulties the computer cannot do for us can be conquered and we could find out anything we want via the Internet. In a word, the computer is a tool, and only having the computer online, it could exploit its advantages to the full. What’s more, since we can get online through mobile now and we may have other kinds of ways in the future, the computer becomes not the most essential tool to utilize the Internet information. So, perhaps, next time we will use other else machines combined with computer system to surf on the Internet and learn more.