Mar. 15th - discussion questions

<Comprehension Questions>

1. Defined these terms on your own words:

 - phonemic awareness: understandings of the canonical principles that words are made up of different phonemic elements. For example, if a learner can pronounce both a word in a full form and individual sounds which make up the word, the learner has phonemic awareness of that word.

 - Item learning: learning a language through accumulating infinite knowledge. Typical example would be picking up high-frequency words which are stored in full forms, usually for ease of retrieving. Or, unique words difficult to apply rules are also learned through item learning.

 - System learning: developing linguistic rules that compose a word or grammar. Applying rules of affixes would be one of examples of system learning.

 - word attack skills: a method to raise phonemic awareness. Both putting the phonemes together and distinguishing the phonemes in a word would be a good practice of word attack skills.

 - Four approaches to spelling improvement: 

  1) spelling and meaning-focused input: more exposure to the text written in the target language would lead to more learning. If texts provide rich, meaningful input to learners, the learners would construct spelling by themselves.

  2) spelling and meaning-focused output: Perhaps the very fundamental skill in writing is how to spell. Meaningful writing activities would provide teachers with an opportunity to check their students' spelling skills, whereas students can practice their spelling.

 3) spelling and language-focused learning: Especially for the beginning-level readers, spelling should be highlighted as a form of language-focused learning. However, according to the text, this should not be excessive.

 4) spelling and fluency development: Retrieving the spelling of a specific word should be automatized, especially in the case of high-frequency words. Writing on a topic in limited time is an example for fluency development.

2. Discuss all the ways of recognizing letters and words that you have read in this chapter and you have known from your experience.

     First, I agree with the prerequisites for reading instruction up to 100 percent. I have taught English to female adults who were refugees from Somalia several months ago, but I was completely frustrated at the first time because they were even not literate in their L1. The conventions and very fundamental knowledge of reading are often considered as just naturally emerging skills, or even their existences are neglected because it is too "natural" to know them. However, it was not the case, at least for them. They had nothing related to reading experiences. I had to instruct all the conventions, such as how to grab a pencil and how to write from left to right. After we have covered alphabets in a month, we were able to move on to the phonics part. They were supposed to understand the words are made up of different alphabets which have their unique sounds. While I was devising techniques for my students and planning my lesson, I have considered about all those things, so I couldn't help but agree with the prerequisite part the most.
     When it comes to my own experience, I learned phonics after I had learned how to construct meanings out of a given text. I did not know how to read the sentences aloud, but I did know what did those mean. Therefore I think that reading skill can be more improved if phonics lessons are combined with reading lessons. If I were able to read it aloud, I might be more competent in pronunciation and English language itself. To achieve this, I strongly believe that children's literatures written in English are necessary. I've taken a course named "Children's literature" while I was living in the US. The literatures were full of authentic, vivid, and intriguing stories that would attract many young readers in Korea as well as kids in the US. For instance, "Green eggs and ham" written by Dr. Seuss does not involve difficult grammatical structures or vocabularies. Rather, it is his main purpose that make young readers feel the rhymes and rhythms of language. Thus if appropriate assistance is given, I think there would be no serious problem for them to understand those literatures.

3. Discuss the ways of spelling words that you have read in this chapter and you have known from your experience.

Looking my experiences back, I was learning how to spell "incidentally" rather than deliberatively. I did not make conscious efforts to understand the spellings of words; instead, the spelling just came into my mind without losing its original form. But one point to note is that I was able to pronounce all the words as well. I think I have internalized pronunciation rules - "system learning" what the text calls - before I began to memorize spellings of difficult words. Therefore, I guess I was able to apply the pronunciation rules to spellings, instead of retrieving the whole spellings from my memory. 

4. Many English teachers in Korea have their students spend much time practicing phonics (in case of young learners) and memorizing words. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of this instruction from the knowledge that you have built through this chapter.

The strength of this approach is, I believe, that the building blocks of language could be well established through this method from the very first stage of learning L2. Without knowing words and phonemic items, it is obvious that learners neither can construct meaning out of a text nor read the text aloud. In opposition, I believe there is high possibility that the learners taught only through this method would lose their interests on English. They cannot enjoy meaningful texts and conversations in English only with the knowledge of phonics and words. Enjoyable materials motivate readers of English; however, if they are deprived of this fun, it is very likely for them to lose interests.