Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling ...system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a 'war of orthographies' parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically. The way we spell often represents an attempt to associate with, or dissociate from, other languages. In Spelling and Society, Mark Sebba explores why matters of orthography are of real concern to so many groups, as a reflection of culture, history and social practices, and as a powerful symbol of national or local identity. This 2007 book will be welcomed by students and researchers in English language, orthography and sociolinguistics, and by anyone interested in the importance of spelling in contemporary society.
Ce travail vise à étudier la difficulté des apprenants thaïlandais dans la prononciation de la consonne /v/ du français en position initiale de syllabe et cherche à expliquer les raisons pour ...lesquelles cette consonne est souvent confondue avec /w/ par ces apprenants. Suite à l’étude des processus de romanisation du thaï et de translittération des emprunts en caractères thaïs, nous relevons qu’il existe une association entre la graphie < v > et le son w dans la langue depuis plusieurs siècles. Une étude expérimentale est alors menée dans le but de vérifier l’hypothèse d’un effet de l’orthographe sur la prononciation de /v/ à travers les deux tâches (lecture oralisée et imitation). Les résultats confirment une réelle difficulté des apprenants thaïlandais dans la prononciation de /v/ et montrent que la présence de l’orthographe augmente considérablement le taux de confusion entre /v/ et /w/, quels que soient le type de stimuli, le contexte vocalique et la position de /v/ dans le mot observé (initiale ou médiane). L'apprenant réussit à imiter approximativement /v/ dans quelques cas mais le taux de non-réussite reste très élevé.
Why do Thai learners often confuse /v/ and /w/ in French? A pilot experimental study on the effect of orthography.
This work investigates Thai learners’ difficulty in pronouncing French consonant /v/ in syllable-initial position and seeks to explain the reasons why this consonant is very often confused with w by Thai learners. Our study on the processes of Thai romanization and the transliteration of loanwords into Thai characters shows that there has been an association between the < v > grapheme and the w sound in the Thai language for several centuries. We therefore conducted an experimental study to verify hypotheses based on a possible effect of orthography on the /v/ pronunciation through the two tasks (oral reading and imitation). The results confirm a real challenge for Thai learners in the pronunciation of /v/ and show that the presence of the orthography considerably increases the confusion rate between /v/ and /w/, whatever the type of stimuli, the vowel context and the position of /v/ in the word (initial or medial). The participant manages to approximatively imitate /v/ in few cases, but the rate of non-success remains very high.
"This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It’s a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age ...or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters <a, e, i, o, u>) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables."
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing ...out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
Spelling Scots Bann, Jennifer; Corbett, John
2015, 2015-10-31
eBook
This book analyses the development of Modern Scots orthography and compares the spelling used in key works of literature, showing how canonical writers of poetry and fiction in Scots have blended ...convention and innovation in presenting Scots.
Many teachers are frustrated with how spelling is traditionally taught and finding the time to support young spellers with explicit strategy instruction. Author Mark Weakland developed Super ...Spellers: Seven Steps to Transforming Your Spelling Instruction, an approach to teaching spelling in a way that is research-based and tied to authentic reading and writing. Super Spellers helps teachers understand what their students need through frequent formative assessments. The book focuses on the scope of spelling instruction and teaching spelling strategies to increase students' word-solving skills. Once kids are comfortable and competent spellers they become super readers and writers, too. In addition to step-by-step guidance, each chapter features an If you only have 10 minutes lesson plan segment. The appendix contains word inventories, a sample scope and sequence, examples of spelling list transformation, and word ladder activities.
This study examined the dynamic relationships among the components of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in a transparent orthography (Finnish) and the predictive value of cognitive skills ...(phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid naming, and vocabulary) on the SVR components. Altogether, 1,815 Finnish children were followed from kindergarten to Grade 3. Their cognitive skills were assessed in kindergarten, listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grades 1 and 2, and reading comprehension in Grades 1–3. Reading fluency and listening comprehension accounted for 37% of the variance in reading comprehension in Grade 2 and 28% in Grade 3. The direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension disappeared after Grade 1, whereas the effect of listening comprehension remained significant across time. Cognitive skills predicted reading comprehension mainly indirectly via listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grade 1. These findings support the validity of the SVR model in the context of a transparent orthography, but they also show that the direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension wanes after the early school years.
It is widely acknowledged that opaque orthographies place additional demands on learning, often requiring many years to fully acquire. It is less widely recognized, however, that such opacity may ...offer certain benefits in the context of reading. For example, heterographic homophones such as ⟨knight⟩ and ⟨night⟩ (words that sound the same but which are spelled differently) impose additional costs in learning but reduce ambiguity in reading. Here, we consider the possibility that—left to evolve freely—writing systems will sometimes choose to forego some simplicity for the sake of informativeness when there is functional pressure to do so. We investigate this hypothesis by simulating the evolution of orthography as it is transmitted from one generation to the next, both with and without a communicative pressure for ambiguity avoidance. In addition, we consider two mechanisms by which informative heterography might be selected for: differentiation, in which new spellings are created to differentiate meaning (e.g., ⟨lite⟩ vs. ⟨light⟩), and conservation, in which heterography arises as a byproduct of sound change (e.g., ⟨meat⟩ vs. ⟨meet⟩). Under pressure from learning alone, orthographic systems become transparent, but when combined with communicative pressure, they tend to favor some additional informativeness. Nevertheless, our findings also suggest that, in the long term, simpler, transparent spellings may be preferred in the absence of top-down explicit teaching.
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