March 9

4 Ways to Support High-Performing World Language Learners

4 Ways to Support High-Performing World Language Learners

Differentiated tasks can help ensure that all learners in the classroom are engaged, including those who are ready for more challenges.

By John Paul Obillos Dela Rosa
March 7, 2022
Two people watering a plant
Michael Austin / The iSpot

Have you encountered students who consistently put their best foot forward, no matter what they’re doing? Students who are resourceful, take charge of their own learning, and have the ability to use their critical thinking skills in learning another language? They’re probably high-performing.

My Tagalog classroom is no exception. Throughout my career as a world language teacher, I have been impressed by how high-performing students would ace every spoken or written assessment that I gave. However, along with the joy of witnessing these students excelling, I worry about not being able to match my teaching with what they really need to continue growing.

I apply these four practices in my classroom to better accommodate and engage high-performing students, without compromising other learners:

PROVIDE DIFFERENTIATED TASKS TO NURTURE CREATIVITY AND CRITICAL THINKING

Instructional planning involves informed decision-making and is further strengthened by the way we respond to learners’ needs.

In one activity, I asked the class to craft a word cloud (using a free word cloud generator) featuring their favorite Tagalog word. Students explored the online tool and presented their outputs in whatever format they chose. High-performing learners specifically were able to use interesting shapes as well as connect those shapes to the meanings of their chosen Tagalog word. One learner chose the word oras (time) and created a word cloud in the shape of a clock that included related Tagalog phrases and words, such as the three aspects of verbs—perpektibo (past), imperpektibo (present), and kontemplatibo (future).

When it comes to nurturing high-performing learners’ critical thinking skills, however, try to entertain their questions and provide resources that will satisfy their curiosity. Exposing them to additional new content as they learn the target language or culture is a good way to develop their critical thinking skills. My students are better able to explore other points of view and expand their horizons on the topics they are most invested in. This can also be done with other advanced learners who are interested in either learning more about an aspect of the target language or better understanding some cultural notes about a country where the language is spoken.

After discussing the concept of pakikipagtawaran (haggling) in the Filipino culture, one student shared a story about her father, who was a “good haggler” himself. To feed her curiosity, I sent a copy of a research study on the haggling behavior of Filipinos for her to peruse.

GROUP HIGH-PERFORMING LEARNERS WITH THEIR CLASSMATES: HOMOGENEOUSLY OR HETEROGENEOUSLY

Collaboration ushers in a more meaningful and interactive world language learning experience. I always consider variety and the nature of the tasks given when determining which type of grouping to use. Similar-ability groupings help high-performing students enjoy activities within their levels of understanding, while also giving teachers the opportunity to introduce tasks that are a little more complex or challenging than usual.

A group of high-performing students from my class chose to produce a video of beautiful places in their area—the West Coast of the United States—as part of a lesson on locating places and events in Tagalog using the Nasa (where a place is) and Sa (where an event is) sentences. I especially enjoyed how they extended their discourse by going beyond the sentence patterns I taught them, and the way they enunciated words made it feel like there were native Tagalog speakers in the room.

At the same time, when world language learners are in mixed-ability groups, they can gain knowledge and understanding from diverse perspectives. This enriches the world language learning experience because students get to negotiate meaning and build trust with one another when accomplishing their tasks as a group. On top of that, high-performing learners can serve as mentors or facilitators for their group. I call it a “bayanihan” moment, when members of the group help one another to reach a goal. This is a nod to the Filipino spirit of community that highlights people’s unity and camaraderie in times of crisis.

I asked students to negotiate with an assigned tindero/tindera (vendor) to practice their haggling skills in Tagalog. The goal was to persuade the vendor to grant the tawad (discount) that they wanted. The high-performing learners made sure that they were there to help their group members if a peer forgot what to say or how to respond to a question in the target language. Some students even translated difficult phrases to make meaning more comprehensible and interpretable for others.

ACKNOWLEDGE LEARNERS’ CONTRIBUTIONS WITH POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Whether written or verbal, the right amount of positive feedback provides encouragement to all learners. This is especially true for high-performing students, who we can motivate by acknowledging their accomplishments and excellent work in class. But balance is key.

When every single contribution is praised, student confidence may turn to arrogance, translating to inappropriate comparisons between themselves and the rest of the group or license to reduce their effort and engagement in class. Additionally, other students may feel that high-performing learners are highly favored or, worse, receiving special treatment.

I ask myself three questions to help me identify if I am giving the right amount and type of positive feedback to high-performing learners:

  1. What is the purpose of this positive feedback? Am I, for example, giving positive feedback to encourage good behavior and strengthen good study habits in class?
  2. Am I giving learners the opportunity to reflect on their performance when given constructive positive feedback?
  3. Am I overdoing positive feedback to the point that negative comparisons or competitions among learners are already forming?

In addition to these questions, this article on maximizing feedback in the classroom has been helpful for me.

OFFER RELEVANT CHOICES IN TERMS OF EXTENDED WORK OR ASSIGNMENTS

Choice is everything in my classroom. Aside from accommodating learner differences, choices allow high-performing students to showcase the knowledge and skills they have acquired in a different context.

I usually present three options to choose from—easy, average, and difficult—for their extended work, explaining my expectations for each. Each assignment type has a corresponding number of points, though I do not explicitly tell them that the points they earn depend on the complexity of the assignment; learners notice this themselves.

In my beginning Tagalog class, I ask learners to choose among three extended works to be presented in class the next day. I have them apply what they learned about Baybayin, an ancient Filipino script:

  • For the first option, the learners were to write just their names using Baybayin.
  • The second, slightly harder, option was to write theirs and another person’s name.
  • The last and most challenging option was to write all the names of their family members.
Category: Classroom Management, Collaboration, ELA, ELL | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 23

A Simple Tool for Aligning Instruction and Assessment

ASSESSMENT

A Simple Tool for Aligning Instruction and Assessment

This quick visual guide can help teachers ensure that their daily lessons align with their learning goals and assessments.

By Jorge Valenzuela
February 18, 2022
Teacher works at her desk
StockRocket / iStock

Teaching at our best is like anything else we pursue; it’s part science and part art. It’s a learned skill that requires time and patience to hone. Teachers, therefore, become frustrated when our self-efficacy is threatened by questionable policies and relentless new initiatives, particularly during a pandemic. But having a set of trusted pedagogical strategies can help us keep it together—even under extreme pressure.

In coaching schools, part of the initial work is to engage leadership in learning walks to see what’s happening in classrooms before investing time and resources to design professional development (PD). Classrooms will always be the incubator for what’s needed in education.

It’s challenging for administrators to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in their schools if they’re not interacting with teachers in classrooms or listening to them. These visits also allow school leaders to recommend appropriate tools and practices for empowering teachers.

FLOW AND ALIGNMENT

Through no fault of their own, I have found that many classroom teachers don’t always see how assessment drives instruction or the alignment between summative assessment, learning goals, formative assessment, and teaching strategies/scaffolds. For example, a career switcher who didn’t participate in a preservice program or a teacher whose preservice program included very little instructional modeling may not have a set of pedagogical strategies at their disposal for planning and facilitating instruction.

There isn’t only one way to teach. But daily lessons must have flow and alignment.

Classroom teachers need to have fluidity and a reservoir of trusted strategies they know when to use. These strategies must be part of methods for attacking daily instructional problems with flexibility to address unforeseen occurrences. A planning tool and framework for mapping instruction backward can be helpful in maintaining alignment no matter what we encounter in the instructional day.

To help support teachers, I’ve adapted the tool during lesson/project ideation sessions. It’s been helpful for teachers who may not understand how to rewrite standards into learning goals or for those who may need a refresher on scaffolding and creating instructional alignment. Some of the schools I work with have even added the tool into their lesson and performance task templates. See a template and completed example here.

The tool originates from PBLWorks and is inspired by backward design methodology by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins but does not replace McTighe’s Understanding by Design resources through ASCD. Instead, the tool is a simple table with four columns, easily allowing educators to map their instruction in alignment with summative assessment and daily learning goals.

ALIGNING INSTRUCTION IN 4 STEPS

Column one: Determine summative assessment. Well-designed summative assessments drive instruction when they align to standard(s) or a benchmark. The tool should be used to align instruction for summative assessments in the form of products, demonstration of a performance task(s), or literary composition.

For example, a particular unit or project plan can call students to create written, technology-based, or constructed products (e.g., reports, PSAs, model prototypes, etc.). Once we determine what we want our kids to do and make by the end of a specified time, that goes into column one.

Column two: Compose learning goals. Developing learning goals for lessons and projects is a critical practice often neglected in PD and, therefore, is often excluded or not well thought out in curriculum unit design. Derived from academic standards and learning frameworks, learning goals are vital to teaching and observing learning and are the backbone of lessons.

Good learning goals drive what students will understand and what they will be able to accomplish following a lesson or project. They need to go beyond objectives on our whiteboard or lesson plan and should be unpacked during mini-lessons as the focal point of the academic conversation between teachers and students.

I use learning targets (LTs) to capture learning goals as statements about what students can do regarding completing the product or task in column one of the planning tool. Here are some examples of what can go in column two:

  • I can explain how human activity affects the health of bodies of water and the ecosystems they support.
  • I can collect and analyze data to inform my decisions and design better solutions to real-world problems.
  • I can present my conclusions to an audience using multimedia tools that more effectively convey my message.

EL Education has powerful video examples of how to use LTs across the grade levels.

Column three: Develop formative assessments. Each learning goal in column two will need formative assessment to check students’ understanding. Teachers can decide on both informal and formal formative assessments. I find conducting two formal checks (quizzes, essays, etc.) for each summative assessment good practice for determining where students need help, remediation, and challenge.

Informal checks can be used daily between our interactions with students to determine their instructional needs. Here are some we can use as quick checks for understanding.

Column four: Utilize instructional strategies and scaffolds. Instructional strategies and scaffolds are what we reach for to teach a particular lesson—or, in this case, the learning goal(s) in column two. Learning goals require us to explain, clarify, and model. Regardless, students will need time to practice—moving from guided (teacher-led) to independent.

Gleaning insights from formative assessment helps us put the appropriate scaffolds and interventions in place by updating column four. For example, to help students with their coding skills, I like using the workshop model to structure station rotations allowing them to move between working independently and working with the teacher or their peers. Both content and elective teachers can also use it for differentiating and choosing scaffolds that work best for their kids.

Category: Assessment, Classroom Management, Collaboration, ELA, ELL, Math, Reading, Reading Intervention, Teaching Strategies | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 19

Literacy Activities That Boost Content Learning

Literacy Activities That Boost Content Learning

BY  · 

A MiddleWeb Blog

In classes like social studies and science, students are expected to do complex nonfiction reading, but how can we ensure that they retain the content so that they can transfer it for future use?

One method is to ask students to represent the information in different forms, helping them grow their ability to think flexibly and critically.

These activities fall under “generalization” on the learning hierarchy and push students to use the information in a new way, making it more useful, and therefore, harder to forget.

Understanding the Math We Teach

These are some of the strategies that I have used in my classes. I am eager to add to the list.

Blackout Summaries

Writing blackout poetry is a literacy activity that I’ve used successfully for many years. After reading an article, students use markers to cross out words, leaving only a poem that summarizes what they’ve read.

As with most art, constraints improve the output: limit the number of words that students can use in a row, or set a minimum or maximum number of words.

Once the activity is complete, I like to have each table group choose the best from their team and then hang those around the classroom for a gallery walk. When they see the commonalities between the poems, it reinforces the main ideas of the text.

Scrambled Sections

During our study of world religions, I wanted to ensure students thoughtfully read an article about the Dalai Lama. To get them talking and processing, I spaced the Newsela article into segments and cut it into strips.

In small groups, students read the sections and arranged them into what they thought was the correct order. Once they had read it through and were sure that they had it right, I gave them the original article, printed in a different color.

I liked the reasoning in student conversations that arose from this activity. As an observer, I was also able to see which students were using text features to achieve their goal.

Collaborative Responses

Each student in a table group gets their own color Post-it note, where they write their response to an open-ended question. They then share their responses with each other and decide upon the best, most thoughtful answer.

I would be careful with the pairings for this activity, as sometimes students assume they know who will have the best answer even when it isn’t the case. Each group then shares their chosen response with the class.

Tic Tac Tell

A student completes a Tic Tac Tell summary on the Nazca Lines.

I first learned about this activity from Glenn Weibe’s website many years ago. Vocabulary words related to the article are listed in a nine-block grid. Students then choose three words in a row to use in a paragraph summarizing their understanding. They highlight the selected words in the paragraph.

This would also be a fun way to start a class period by projecting a grid of nine important words from the previous lesson and asking students to share their understanding.

Rank the Evidence

Ask students to read an article or watch a video that has two perspectives; we watched the TED-Ed video on Genghis Khan as “Unifier or Tyrant.”

I gave students eight Post-its, four of each color, and asked them to write one piece of evidence per Post-it that supports each side of the argument. Next they ranked the evidence from strongest to weakest and decided which perspective was more convincing. The final step was to discuss their findings with a partner.

A Few More Quick Ideas

► After students read an article with the title removed, ask them to write what they think would be the best title for it and share with their table groups.

► Give students a photograph from history with conversation bubbles added. Ask them to practice perspective-taking and demonstrate understanding by adding dialogue to the image.

Source: History Tech

► Pair students up with a photo or image centered on a piece of blank paper. Ask them to have a silent, written conversation about what they notice or wonder. This is a great introductory activity that will give you insight into what the students already know about a topic.

Resources

► The Benefits of Deeper Learning: Retention, Transfer and Motivation by Natalie Saaris, 2017 at Actively Learn

► The Instructional Hierarchy: Linking Stages of Learning to Effective Instructional Techniques at Intervention Central

Civically Engaged
Category: Classroom Management, ELA, ELL, Reading, Teaching Strategies, Writing | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 6

So many muches! Grammar errors and what they tell us about language development

Posted bylauramacgrathPosted inReading

 

When kids first begin talking, typically at around 12 months of age, they of course stick to the basics— very short phrases that convey basic wants, needs, and social routines.  Mama.  More.  Up.  Hi!  All-done.  Milk.  Doggy.  Bye-bye.  Oops!  These are mostly one-word phrases and are not pronounced perfectly.  Then, typically when children are between 1 ½ and 2 years old, they take an important step in language learning: making word combinations.  More milk.  Mama car.  Up Daddy.  No doggy.  The intended meaning of early phrases might not be very clear out of context (Mama car could mean “look, there’s mommy’s car” or “here mommy, take my toy car”), but a child at this stage of language development shows us that he is beginning to understand that words are units of meaning that can be combined in novel ways to creating novel meanings, as in Mama car.  Big car.  Car up.  Once we know a good number of words and understand our language’s grammar, we can combine words to generate phrases that explain anything we want.  That is, language is generative.  The possibilities are literally endless.

Sometime around 2 years old, children usually begin using grammatical morphemes, or the little parts of words that make our phrases grammatically complete, and can express nuances like tense and number.  One of the earliest in English is the present progressive -ing, as in crying, eating, going.  Regular plurals (cups) and regular past tense (climbed) are also acquired pretty early on.  As children learn new grammatical forms, they are not just memorizing whole words.  Rather, they are learning the grammatical rules of whatever language (or languages) they are acquiring.  They learn how we can take these little word parts and apply them to other words we know, to create new shades of meaning.  For example, boat means something different than boats; walking means something different than walked.

The morphemes for plural and past tense are a little more complicated than they may appear at first glance.  There are actually three different pronunciations for each of these grammatical markers, depending on the sound at the end of the root word.

Root word ends in: Plural “-s” morpheme sounds like:
/p, t, k, f, th (voiceless)/ /s/ as in cups, hats, snacks, cliffs, baths
/b, d, g, m, n, ng, v, th (voiced), l, r/
and any vowel sound		 /z/ as in tubs, beds, bags, drums, hens, songs, doves, lathes, balls, cars, cows, bees, pies
/s, z, sh, ch, j/ /ez/ as in buses, sizes, bushes, watches, badges
Root word ends in: Past tense “-ed” morpheme sounds like:
/p, k, f, th (voiceless), s, sh, ch/ /t/ as in hopped, walked, coughed, birthed, flossed, washed, watched
/b, g, m, n, ng, v, th (voiced), z, j/
and any vowel sound		 /d/ as in rubbed, hugged, hummed, banned, arrived, bathed, buzzed, waged, bowed, peed, tied
/t, d/ /ed/ as in batted, glided

These context-dependent variations on morphemes are called allomorphs.  So using the above examples, /s, z, ez/ are allomorphs of the regular plural morpheme -s, and /t, d, ed/ are allomorphs of the regular past tense morpheme -ed.  Despite the different sounds, children are typically able to learn and apply grammar rules just by talking with adults around them, without even being aware that these variations exist.  Our knowledge of spoken grammar is mostly subconscious: you don’t even know that you know it.  In fact, I would wager that most adults who have not studied linguistics or early literacy instruction are not aware of allomorphs, and also probably can’t easily explain other grammar basics, such as when exactly we use he versus him and that the suffix -ly is used to change an adjective to an adverb.

So how do we know that little kids are actually applying their knowledge of grammatical rules, rather than just learning new grammatical words as whole units, parroting words they have heard mom or dad say?  After all, most 2-year-olds won’t say, “Today I learned that I have to put a sss, zzz, or ez at the end of the word to indicate that there is more than one thing.”  How do we know that they know that?

For starters, children will begin to apply a rule more and more consistently, using it across multiple contexts, which suggests that the rule is acquired.  Furthermore, we hear evidence of grammar knowledge in the errors and inventions that are so common in the speech of young children.  When children make errors such as mouses instead of mice, they have not likely heard an adult say the word mouses, meaning they just came up with it on their own.  This is an example of overgeneralization of a grammatical morpheme- using it where it doesn’t actually belong.  While it’s technically not correct to say mouses, it’s a normal stage of language development and shows that the child can generate words using the plural marker.

I recently polled an online parenting forum for examples of such inventions of words.  The post generated a lot of interest, and responses were both adorable and brilliant.  Let’s take a look at some, and see what they tell us about those children’s understanding of spoken grammar.

Quite a few kids demonstrated understanding of present progressing -ing.  As mentioned, it is one of the earlier emerging grammatical morphemes, and so there’s a lot of opportunity for kids to get creative.  There was a girl who said someone doing yoga in the park was namasteing.  A boy was wapping things with his wapping stick.  Another child used puzzling to mean playing with puzzles.  In the autumn, the leaves are fall-downing.  You go grossing at the grocery store.  A truck is back-upping.  And finally, I AM carefulling!!

There was a child who stuck two allomorphs at the end of words to mark plurals: carses, cookieses, toeses.  (Moses supposes his toeses are roses?)  Another child mistook the word much for a noun, and showed her ability to use the plural /ez/ allomorph: so many muches.

soooo many muches!!

One child said at bedtime Can you cush and coze me? meaning that she wanted her mom to make her cushy and cozy.  This represents an understanding of the suffix -y in adjectives.  She knows that -y often means having the quality of the root word (which could be either nouns as in sandy or verbs as in runny), and so invented root word verbs cush and coze.

This next one is particularly genius, in a couple of ways.  A child apparently said that when the family car got new tires, it was retired.  This shows an understanding of the prefix re-, meaning to do something again (to again put tires on a car).  Then, adding -ed in this case changes the word from a noun to an adjective, called a participial adjective (as in I am bored).  Also, we know that retired is a word that actually does exist, although it means something completely different.  Likely this child heard that word at one point, and used his smarts about morphology to infer a possible meaning.  Genius!

Here’s a neat one: a child used willn’t instead of won’t, apparently having analyzed all the other n’t contractions and determining that they should closely resemble the words from which they are derived (as in do-don’t, can-can’t, should-shouldn’t).  So of course the opposite of will is willn’t.  I’d like to see how many grown-ups have thought of that.  Not me, to be honest, and I think about a lot of stuff like this.  Thanks, kiddo, for pointing me towards this explanation.

Another little girl apparently used peace-ify in the place of pacify, I’m guessing in the context of talking about a baby’s pacifier bringing about a moment of peace.  That parent basically has a mini etymologist on her hands, because this kid probably already knows that both peace and pacify come from the Latin word pax, and the suffix -ify changes a word to a verb that means to become the root word.

Similar to the cush and coze example, this one involves the child removing a part of a word.  Hammers are what you use the ham things.  The -er suffix changes a word from an action to a thing that does the action.  Workers work.  Players play.  Hammers ham.  Of course!

I want so badly for this next one to be correct: the child who thought that the opposite of nocturnal was turnal.  It’s brilliant, because a) the kid already knows the word nocturnal b) it still shows awareness that words can break into parts, and c) noc sounds like not, so it’s a pretty reasonable guess!  Alas, in this case, noct comes from the Latin nox for night.  (The opposite of nocturnal is diurnal, which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard in my life.)

Threeth.  Not a word, but the kid who said it gets that the suffix -th is used to express the ordinal numbers such as fourth, twentieth, and billionth (but not first, second, third).

Some kids were able to show understanding of morphemes for negation: dis-, un-, and de-.   One wanted to be disbored (bored of being bored?), another who wanted his friend to be unsick so they could play, and another who said he would never delove his mother (I’m not crying, you’re crying!!).

These next ones involve little phrases.  English has many two-word verbs, such as shut down, figure out, fit in, that are often idiomatic phrases (and notoriously difficult for English second-language speakers).  A few parents shared examples that demonstrate that the child knows that grammatically there is such thing as a two-word verb, but hasn’t quite gotten it right: pick me down, buckle me out, and tuck me up (ok, that last one is my own son).

Next, some examples from bilingual or multilingual households, where kids sometimes mix vocabulary and grammar from more than one language in the same phrase. For example, a little girl who said lumes to mean that something lit up.  This is a sweet mash-up of French luminer and English -s third person singular. She also used unlâche to tell someone let go of something.  This shows that she likely knows the un- English morpheme for negation, but lâche in French already means let go.

Another bilingual child was mad because her brother retruired her castle.  The child combined re-, détruir (destroy), and the English past tense -ed.  Seems like someone wrecked that castle a few times over.

And finally, because no story about preschoolers in complete without reference to poop and/or boogers: microttes.  This one is a portmanteau, or a word coined by blending two words, such as breakfast + lunch = brunch.   A child from a trilingual French-Spanish-English house apparently regularly invented her own words and one day came up with microttes as a combination of microbes (germs) and crottes (boogers/little poops).  Great! And gross, so let’s go wash our hands, shall we?

Are you curious about the age at which children typically acquire grammatical morphemes?  Although we have a pretty clear picture of the sequence of development of early grammar, the age of acquisition varies a lot from child to child.  This chart can give a general idea, though a word of caution: age estimates are based on observations of a rather small number of children.

Grammatical morpheme Examples Common age of acquisition
Present progressive ing

Prepositions on, in

Regular plural

 Eating.

On the table.  In the car.

Dogs, cats

 27-30 months
Irregular past tense

Possessive ‘s

Uncontractible copula

 It fell.

Mommy’s coffee

Is it here? It is!

 31-34 months
Articles a, the

Regular past tense

3rd person singular -s

 A flower.  The car.

I licked my ice cream.

He likes pizza.

 35-40 months
3rd person of have, do

Forms of the verb be

 He has a dog.  She does yoga.

He is climbing. I’m not sliding, but she is. Are you hungry?

 41-46 months+
From: Bowen, C. (1998). Brown’s Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development. Retrieved from http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33 on September 24, 2020.

This post has been about children’s development of spoken grammar.  Some children need extra help with this, but, as previously mentioned, children learn spoken language mostly by simply talking with others.  Little kids don’t need to worry about understanding how grammar works in spoken language, because they unconsciously learn the rules.  However, we know that learning written language is not the same process.  In order to efficiently acquire literacy skills, school-aged children benefit from explicit teaching of many aspects grammar.  For example, many young children will write stopped as stopt and hugged as hugd.  When we teach kids that the letters ed at the end of a word represent the regular past tense, we are teaching morphological awareness. This helps developing readers decode, understand, and spell complex words such as impossible, cooperation, mismanagement, unfathomable. But morphological awareness is a huge topic for another day. Willn’t you stay tuned??

Category: Assessment, ELA, ELL, Reading, Reading Intervention, Teaching Strategies, Word Analysis/Spelling/Phonics, Writing | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 6

The cot-caught merger: a dialectal difference and early literacy instruction

Posted bylauramacgrath
Posted in Reading Language is always evolving, with new words (bingeable, superspreader), new expressions (I can’t even), and even shifting syntax (Have you any? vs Do you have any?) and grammar (the fading subjunctive: If I were…).  But the main topic of interest today is shifts in pronunciation.  The way we pronounce words changes slowly over time, often specific to a geographical area or demographic, resulting in a patchwork of different accents among speakers of the same language.

Pronunciations can sometimes change so much that sounds that were once distinctly different are now pronounced exactly the same.  This is known as a merger. A well-known and wide-spread example of this is the low-back merger, a.k.a. the cot-caught merger, where the vowels in the words cot and caught have evolved so that they are no longer two distinct sounds.  Depending on where you live, you might be thinking one of two things right now: Of course “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same! or There’s no way that “cot” and “caught” sound the same!  Pretty much all Canadians have the cot-caught merger, while the US population is split between merged and unmerged.  As a result, although the different spellings remain, the vowel sounds in the words cot/caught, nod/gnawed, stock/stalk are identical for some English speakers and not for others.  If you have the cot-caught merger and have a hard time understanding how other people can possibly produce and perceive these as two different sounds, you may like to check out this video.

Cot and caught sound the same in Canada, and much of the western US. They are distinct in much of the eastern US.
A vowel chart shows English vowels arranged by place of articulation, from the front to the back of the mouth, from closed to open mouth, with cot and caught not merged.

This is all very interesting, but what’s the application to literacy instruction?  Well, this is an issue that comes up surprisingly often in online forums for literacy and language enthusiasts, including a few times recently in a wonderful community on Facebook called Science of Reading- What I Should Have Learned in College, a group dedicated to sharing knowledge about evidence-based practice in literacy.  People in this group know that a very efficient way to teach kids to read and spell involves having them pay attention to the sounds in their spoken words, and then linking these sounds to the letters of our alphabet.  This approach is aptly called speech to print.

There are many published materials that help teachers apply the speech to print approach.  A slight issue is that some of them may not discuss dialectal differences like the cot-caught merger.  So, what happens when one of the millions of people who has the cot-caught merger comes across these materials?  Occasionally, some confusion.  Huh, have I been pronouncing these words wrong my whole life?  Am I actually making a barely perceptible distinction between these two sounds?  Should I help my students make/hear a difference between these sounds?  Thankfully, the answer is no, no, and no.  If you don’t have the distinction in your dialect, you simply don’t have it, because they are the same sound.

If you are one of the millions of speakers with the low-back merger, you don’t need to toss out great instructional materials that differentiate between these sounds.  We just need to understand the phenomenon, so that we can treat the o in fox and the aw in saw as two different graphemic representations of the same sound, without trying to force a distinction that just isn’t there.  If you speak a dialect with the cot-caught merger, the o in fox and the aw in saw are as much the same sound as the ee and ea in tree and treat, which at one time were also distinct sounds that have completely merged for most dialects of English, as of around 300 years ago.

In Lively Letters (Telian & Castagnozzi), different gesture cues normally indicate different sounds.
If you have the low-back merger, just pronounce these the same, and you’re all set!

One precision.  The graphemes for the o and aw/au sounds do not present exactly the same scenario as ee vs ea.  The graphemes ee and ea are both vowel teams: two vowel letters representing one vowel sound, as in meet and meat.  In contrast, o is a short vowel, while aw/au function like vowel teams.  Diving a little deeper, a careful look at English orthography reveals that a number of spelling rules depend on whether a syllable contains a short vowel or vowel team.  For example, we use -ck at the end of a short word following a short vowel, as in rock, while the word hawk requires only -k after the vowel team aw. So, even if they sound the same for you, it probably makes sense to clearly differentiate short o from vowel teams au/aw because it helps us make sense of spelling patterns. As a Canadian, if I were making a sound wall to help children understand the sounds of English, I would put o and aw/au stuck right together, side-by-side, and I would of course pronounce them exactly the same.

From Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats. The cot and caught vowels are differentiated in this chart (fox and saw), though the book discusses dialectal differences. Other spellings for o/aw/au are also shown.

Just to complicate things a little further, not all speakers who have distinct vowels for cot and caught divide these two sounds the same way.  The Atlas of North American English (Labov et al, 2006) explains that in certain contexts, mainly before the voiceless continuant sounds /f, s, th/ (as in off, loss, cloth) and before the /g/ sound (as in dog, frog), words with the short o are actually spoken with a vowel closer to the sound heard in saw/caught.  Hence, hot-dog actually has two different vowel sounds for some speakers, because of the influence of the consonant sounds at the end of each syllable.  Isn’t phonology interesting??

So, what do you do if a curious young mind notices that the o and aw/au are represented by different pictures or gestures, or appear as different on the vowel sound chart, and yet have the same sounds?  Rather than give the all-too-common response “English is complicated!  That’s just how it is!”, you could see it as a neat opportunity to introduce dialect differences and language change: “Some people pronounce these differently, but for us they are the same.”

Does this seem a little complicated? Like very many aspects of literacy and language, the underlying ideas are pretty complex, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be for children. Doctors have oodles of deep knowledge that informs their sometimes simple advice to patients. Similarly, when educators understand the complexities of our language- both the oral and the written systems- they are in a much better position to teach it to young learners, using simple explanations adapted to the children’s needs and capabilities.

I love this topic, because it is a great example of how there is so much knowledge to be shared when people from a variety of backgrounds- speech pathology, education, linguistics, psychology- come together to look at practices in literacy. Does this sort of knowledge float your boat, bake your cake, rock your socks?  You will no doubt love Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats, a comprehensive resource about the oral language underpinnings of literacy development.

References:

Labov, William & Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. 10.1515/9783110206838.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers, 3rd ed. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub.

Posted bylauramacgrathPosted inReading

Language is always evolving, with new words (bingeable, superspreader), new expressions (I can’t even), and even shifting syntax (Have you any? vs Do you have any?) and grammar (the fading subjunctive: If I were…).  But the main topic of interest today is shifts in pronunciation.  The way we pronounce words changes slowly over time, often specific to a geographical area or demographic, resulting in a patchwork of different accents among speakers of the same language.

Pronunciations can sometimes change so much that sounds that were once distinctly different are now pronounced exactly the same.  This is known as a merger. A well-known and wide-spread example of this is the low-back merger, a.k.a. the cot-caught merger, where the vowels in the words cot and caught have evolved so that they are no longer two distinct sounds.  Depending on where you live, you might be thinking one of two things right now: Of course “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same! or There’s no way that “cot” and “caught” sound the same!  Pretty much all Canadians have the cot-caught merger, while the US population is split between merged and unmerged.  As a result, although the different spellings remain, the vowel sounds in the words cot/caught, nod/gnawed, stock/stalk are identical for some English speakers and not for others.  If you have the cot-caught merger and have a hard time understanding how other people can possibly produce and perceive these as two different sounds, you may like to check out this video.

Cot and caught sound the same in Canada, and much of the western US. They are distinct in much of the eastern US.
A vowel chart shows English vowels arranged by place of articulation, from the front to the back of the mouth, from closed to open mouth, with cot and caught not merged.

This is all very interesting, but what’s the application to literacy instruction?  Well, this is an issue that comes up surprisingly often in online forums for literacy and language enthusiasts, including a few times recently in a wonderful community on Facebook called Science of Reading- What I Should Have Learned in College, a group dedicated to sharing knowledge about evidence-based practice in literacy.  People in this group know that a very efficient way to teach kids to read and spell involves having them pay attention to the sounds in their spoken words, and then linking these sounds to the letters of our alphabet.  This approach is aptly called speech to print.

There are many published materials that help teachers apply the speech to print approach.  A slight issue is that some of them may not discuss dialectal differences like the cot-caught merger.  So, what happens when one of the millions of people who has the cot-caught merger comes across these materials?  Occasionally, some confusion.  Huh, have I been pronouncing these words wrong my whole life?  Am I actually making a barely perceptible distinction between these two sounds?  Should I help my students make/hear a difference between these sounds?  Thankfully, the answer is no, no, and no.  If you don’t have the distinction in your dialect, you simply don’t have it, because they are the same sound.

If you are one of the millions of speakers with the low-back merger, you don’t need to toss out great instructional materials that differentiate between these sounds.  We just need to understand the phenomenon, so that we can treat the o in fox and the aw in saw as two different graphemic representations of the same sound, without trying to force a distinction that just isn’t there.  If you speak a dialect with the cot-caught merger, the o in fox and the aw in saw are as much the same sound as the ee and ea in tree and treat, which at one time were also distinct sounds that have completely merged for most dialects of English, as of around 300 years ago.

In Lively Letters (Telian & Castagnozzi), different gesture cues normally indicate different sounds.
If you have the low-back merger, just pronounce these the same, and you’re all set!

One precision.  The graphemes for the o and aw/au sounds do not present exactly the same scenario as ee vs ea.  The graphemes ee and ea are both vowel teams: two vowel letters representing one vowel sound, as in meet and meat.  In contrast, o is a short vowel, while aw/au function like vowel teams.  Diving a little deeper, a careful look at English orthography reveals that a number of spelling rules depend on whether a syllable contains a short vowel or vowel team.  For example, we use -ck at the end of a short word following a short vowel, as in rock, while the word hawk requires only -k after the vowel team aw. So, even if they sound the same for you, it probably makes sense to clearly differentiate short o from vowel teams au/aw because it helps us make sense of spelling patterns. As a Canadian, if I were making a sound wall to help children understand the sounds of English, I would put o and aw/au stuck right together, side-by-side, and I would of course pronounce them exactly the same.

From Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats. The cot and caught vowels are differentiated in this chart (fox and saw), though the book discusses dialectal differences. Other spellings for o/aw/au are also shown.

Just to complicate things a little further, not all speakers who have distinct vowels for cot and caught divide these two sounds the same way.  The Atlas of North American English (Labov et al, 2006) explains that in certain contexts, mainly before the voiceless continuant sounds /f, s, th/ (as in off, loss, cloth) and before the /g/ sound (as in dog, frog), words with the short o are actually spoken with a vowel closer to the sound heard in saw/caught.  Hence, hot-dog actually has two different vowel sounds for some speakers, because of the influence of the consonant sounds at the end of each syllable.  Isn’t phonology interesting??

So, what do you do if a curious young mind notices that the o and aw/au are represented by different pictures or gestures, or appear as different on the vowel sound chart, and yet have the same sounds?  Rather than give the all-too-common response “English is complicated!  That’s just how it is!”, you could see it as a neat opportunity to introduce dialect differences and language change: “Some people pronounce these differently, but for us they are the same.”

Does this seem a little complicated? Like very many aspects of literacy and language, the underlying ideas are pretty complex, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be for children. Doctors have oodles of deep knowledge that informs their sometimes simple advice to patients. Similarly, when educators understand the complexities of our language- both the oral and the written systems- they are in a much better position to teach it to young learners, using simple explanations adapted to the children’s needs and capabilities.

I love this topic, because it is a great example of how there is so much knowledge to be shared when people from a variety of backgrounds- speech pathology, education, linguistics, psychology- come together to look at practices in literacy. Does this sort of knowledge float your boat, bake your cake, rock your socks?  You will no doubt love Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats, a comprehensive resource about the oral language underpinnings of literacy development.

References:

Labov, William & Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. 10.1515/9783110206838.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers, 3rd ed. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub.

Category: Assessment, ELA, ELL, Reading, Reading Intervention, Word Analysis/Spelling/Phonics | LEAVE A COMMENT