02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Reading Wars of the 1990s
WHOLE-language theory holds that learning to read and write English is analogous to learning to speak it -- a natural, unconscious process best fostered by unstructured immersion. In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from ... 1 
notes
notesSite Words VS Phonics. If English was phonetical, we could focus on one strategy, but because many spellings don't match their pronunciations we must also memorize Sight Words as if they were Chinese ideograms.
13 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
With Obtuse Spelling Rules, Pronunciation Becomes Reliant...
Since our current orthografy bears no real relation
to the present pronunciation, but is at best an imperfect attempt to represent that of the Elizabethan
period, English pronunciation has become almost entirely a matter of oral tradition as unsafe a gide in
regard to correctness in speech as it is in regard to
correctness in history. We learn to talk, and continue
to talk, entirely "by ear," and with the same tendency
to uncertainty and variation as do those who play music
by ear. The...
1 12 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Spelling is an Invention, and May be Modified
Spelling was invented by man and, like other human
inventions, is capable of development and improve-
ment by man in the direction of simplicity, economy,
and efficiency. Its true function is to represent as
accurately as possible by means of simbols (letters)
the sounds of the spoken (i. e. the living) language,
and thus incidentally to record its history. Its prov-
ince is not, as is often mistakenly supposed, to indicate
the derivations of words from sources that ar in-
accessible...Note the intentional use of simplified spelling in the text.
09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
What Students Should Develop During Pre-K and Kindergarten
Language skills
At entry to first grade, students will need to have had a broad array of language experiences. Oral language, vocabulary, and other language concepts are crucial foundations for success in reading, especially reading comprehension. In particular, children need to be able to use language to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past.
Early childhood programs can develop children's language by givin...27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Exercise of Directing a Child's Focus
OK, Nicole, while you’re lying still, move your eyes around the room. Even without moving your head, you can see the lamp over on the table. Now look over at your baby pictures. See them? Now look at the bookcase. Can you see the big Harry Potter book there? Now look back at the lamp. Do you see how you have the power to focus your attention all over this room? That’s what I want to teach you about, but we’re going to focus your attention on what’s going on inside your mind and body. ...An example of teaching a child how they can direct their attention at will.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Multisensory Integration
In sensory perception, multisensory integration is the rule, not the exception. In audition, we don’t just hear with our ears, we use our eyes to locate the apparent sources of sounds in the cinema where we “hear” the voices coming from the actors’ mouths on the screen, although the sounds are coming from the sides of the theater. This is known as the ventriloquism effect. Similarly, retronasal odors detected by olfactory receptors in the nose are experienced as tastes in the mouth. T...Folksonomies: perception senses
Folksonomies: perception senses
1 notes
notesBarry C. Smith describes how our senses collaborate, our hearing with our sight to read lips and our sense of smell with taste to enhance one another.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Categorize Sounds Before Words
As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies' speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture. Pat conducted some even more complicated experiments with Swedish babies using simple vowels to see how early they start organizing the sounds of their language in an adult-like way. She showed that at six months the process has already begun. The six...Babies learn the sounds of their language, which gives them the ability to distinguish and categorize words later on.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Can Distinguish Sounds Adults Cannot
Why do the speakers of different languages hear and produce sounds so differently? Ears and mouths are the same the world over. What differs is our brains. Exposure to a particular language has altered our brains and shaped our minds, so that we perceive sounds differently. This in turn leads speakers of different languages to produce sounds differently. When and how do babies start to do this? Do they start out listening like a computer, with no categorical distinctions? Or do they start out... 1 notes
notesBefore a baby learns the sounds of their language, they can distinguish the sounds of any language. Later, they are unable to distinguish the non-categorized sounds when produced in other languages.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Learn The Sounds of Their Language
We mentioned that part of what makes learning language difficult is that languages carve up sounds and different Ianguages carve them up differently. A wide variety of different sounds, with very different spectrograms, will all seem like the same sound to us, and, in turn, that sound will seem sharply different from other sounds that are actually quite similar to it physically. Suppose you use a speech synthesizer to gradually and continuously change one particular feature of a sound, such a... 1 notes
notesWhen a language does not make a clear distinction between two sounds, the children of that language cannot hear the distinction in other languages.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Imitation is Instinctive
Recent research shows that babies begin to imitate facial expressions and gestures from an early age whether they are rewarded or not. Babies are able to mimic facial expressions they see and sounds they hear when they are too young to have learned by practice or by looking in mirrors (Meltzoff 1990). Successfully imitating something seems to be rewarding in itself. We can see now, as the behaviourists could not, why so much of our behavior has to be instinctive. The world is too complicated ... 1 notes
notesThe complexity of our brains makes us natural learners and imitators.
