Week 3 Dialogue Journals (due before week 3's class)
Hello
everyone, this week we'll be covering morphology. The West reading covers the
basic concepts/terms related to morphology and the Carlisle reading focuses on
morphological processing and word learning.
Attention!! Group leaders: If
your name has an * in front of it, you are the group leader for the week 3
journal. Please get your summary and comments posted by Wednesday.
*Jeff, Amy, Jasper, Liz
*Sammy, Kevan, Lawrence, Dee
*John, Laura, David
Summary guidelines: KEEP
IT SHORT! A good summary is a shorter version of the original that
includes only the main points. Try to keep your summaries limited to 200 words
or less.
Comment guidelines: Comments
should demonstrate your ability to personalize the material. Whenever possible,
share your own experiences as language teachers and learners that relate to the
assigned reading. This should be longer than the summary.
Week 3 Reading:
West, Morphology: The Inner World of Words
Carlisle,
J. Fostering Morphological Processing, Vocabulary Development, and
Reading Comprehension.
**Read 'west_ morphology' first to get a
handle on morphology, then read Carlisle. Summarize and comment on the Carlisle
article only. Questions related to the readings can be posed to the community.
Personalize! Share your experiences
teaching/learning vocabulary.
Note: Group leaders should post summaries and comments as
replies to this post
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSorry, here's revised summary for Justin and Dave.
ReplyDeleteHere’s my version of summary for Justin and Dave.
This articles talks about how critical the word knowledge effects students' reading comprehension. Also how one or teacher can help to improve their comprehension skills by using morphology. Through morphological process, a student will be able to guess the newly introduced words by analyzing the words' structure and how it's used in the context, for example if one can recognize the root word and it's affixes, they can make an 'educated guess' of the meaning of the new word.
The article also introduces some study cases that were performed on students, fairly younger ones, implicating methods such as morphologic analysis, and proved it was very effective and helpful in developing students’ vocabulary building process. Also they found that teacher plays critical role to effectively and correctly help students with use of the method when they practice the morphologic analysis.
I found the reading fairly interesting. The most amazing thing to me was that in young learners about 90% of new vocabulary comes outside of intentional study. Thinking about how that applies to my students, especially my 1st graders and the English that they are using in my class and what words we have taught them. I realized that they use a lot of words that we never intentionally taught them. My Korean is very similar in that I learn mostly from conversations and reading subtitled videos rather than intentional study. I really liked some of the techniques that she mentioned. I have used some of them in the past, but had forgotten about the "let the reader stop whenever" technique. I am teaching about 24 1st graders to read English these days so, right now I am excited to get into a class and try some of her close reading stuff. Unfortunately, as that I have 12 at a time, I will need to try and adapt it.
DeleteAny advice on that would be helpful. Some students who get a little more support at home are excelling, while others need some more help. Extra attention from me outside of scheduled class time is impossible. How can I adapt the close reading technique to help the poor readers without neglecting the better ones?
A funny anecdote about using context to decode meaning. When I was 16 I did a student exchange to Germany, where I lived with a family. One night, I asked him what was for dinner. He answered "meerschwein" At the time I was unfamiliar with that word. However, I knew that "meer" was ocean and "schwein" was pig. So I figured that it was just some kind of coastal pork dish. A few weeks later we were walking in a market and there were some guinea pigs in a cage and I asked him what the German word for them was. He said "meerschwein". I was shocked, and he had forgotten his joke. (A revenge beating was then issued)
While she notes that context is usually a great way to decode meaning it can sometimes lead you, or your students, astray.
I have to wonder if some actual teaching theories are trickling down to academies. In 2005 when I first came to Korea, every I was familiar with had a vocab room where students would memorize countless vocabulary words. It seems to have fallen out of fashion. Perhaps because it was almost completely ineffective. I loved asking the students about the words 5 minutes after their vocab quiz and they couldn't tell me what the word meant. Even though they had got perfect on the quiz!
For some reason the computer won't let me reply to Young's comment, so I'll just try and reply here on Dave's.
DeleteA lot of the reading was interesting, and I could identity with some of it. I have in the past had students fumble for a word, during the excitement of an English game, and give the answer ‘floor brush!’ instead of ‘broom’. Also comparing my own situation of learning Korean, I’m much more likely to remember a word using it in a situation, than by memorization. On the subject of prefixes and suffixes, I was more easily able to identity a pattern, in order to make other Korean sentences. By using the suffixes”입니까?” for a question and “입니다” for a statement. These helped me make other sentences that I had not memorized at an early stage of learning the language. As an adult , I had the analytical skills to do so.
This person here, who is that? They are my friend.
이분이누구입니까? 제친구입니다
However, reading on about students becoming invested in analytical strategies, RAVE-O, PHAB and SLAP strategy…Whoa Nelly. A lot of my students just finished learning how not to crap their pants in the classroom. Even for some of the older ones, I think these concepts would just fly over their heads.
Evan, Swati, Sean
ReplyDeleteHope this is okay, guys. Light reading this is not. But I'd be interested in your additional comments or notes.
This article discusses “morphological processing” and that is learning words by combining morphemes (or base words with prefixes or suffixes), such as “tooth” and “brush” to get “toothbrush.” Once they get the handle of this formula, children will continue to apply it (granted occasionally incorrectly such as “floor brush” instead of “broom”) In the article Joanne Carlisle argues for the benefits of word study programs that focus on morphological combinations and inference. She starts off by discussing how 90% of the words children each year come from indirect means and exposure through context, while only 10% come from intentional study. Her claim, backed by studies, is that this method of teaching particularly helps students with learning disabilities. She advocates for the importance of programs that focus on decoding and deriving meaning from complex words by examining their root or base words. Carlisle also says while morphology-based word study programs exist, they focus primarily on vocabulary building and spelling and more needs to be done in assisting the student in decoding and meaning-making strategies. She concludes that students will only improve when they feel they have tools catered towards them that will help to analyze unfamiliar words, which will in turn motivate them to participate more in the classroom since they won’t be expending all their energy on understanding a text through more traditional, dated and incompatible means.
So if I am reading above correctly my personal comment on your summary should be longer than your summary?
DeleteI would first like to relate to my own experience studying languages. In regards to French I studied it quite a while ago, but I remember so many words were very similar to English and that helped more than anything. Although once you know certain patterns, this definitely helps. For instance '~ment' has the same meanly as '~ly', so you would know instantly the word is an adverb if you saw this ending. '~게' (~geh) denotes the same thing in Korean. Unlike French and English there are even less exceptions to the rule. So we have slow - slowly, lent - lentement, and 느린 - 느리게. Sure the structures change a little, but they follow general, easy to recognize patterns. Then there are the not so helpful things, particularly in Korean, sometimes you will get a simple word part like 정 have a look in the dictionary if you would like, but without the Chinese equivalent the meaning could be confused unless it was written in a sentence where the meaning was obvious. In such a case trying to use word parts to associate meaning could present a problem.
In regards to teaching, I find exercises involving compound words such as broomstick, candlestick, matchstick to be quiet successful. However there are problems when it comes to irregular things. Getting back to the '~ly' pattern we can find examples where this can backfire. I have had students tell me they want to go to the washroom 'fastly'. I understand even though it is wrong. When it comes to sentence building exercises we use these a lot to substitute different verbs or nouns into a sentence that uses the same grammar pattern.
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DeleteThanks for the feedback, Sean. Interesting to get your perspective on French, since I don’t know much about that language, except that its rules would of course be much closer in origin to English than any Asian-based languages. As for Korean, I guess while not quite the same as prefixes and suffixes, I can still piece together the meaning of what verbs mean when their tense is changed but the base meaning remains; like “가다” base form to “가요” as informal action verb to “갔어요” as past tense verb. When you isolate the last part you can apply that to some other verbs to make them past tense. Moving past my hackneyed, impromptu Korean lesson that would probably make my 선생님’s head explode, I find that the concept of morphological processing and deriving meaning from root-words when accompanied by prefixes and suffixes to be a very mathematical exercise, so perhaps it appeals to a different part of the brain in the child learner than traditional teaching methods in which dyslexia or other learning disabilities might interfere.
DeleteIf the research does indeed back up the validity of Carlisle’s claims, then I hope this method catches on in the future because it seems effective. In the interest of full disclosure, I am ADHD and some alternative teaching methods such as these might have helped me when I was a kid. I’m not advocating every teacher to start experimenting and forget about all established teaching methods, but stubborn refusal to stray from traditional teaching orthodoxy even when it’s clear that a newer approach works more efficiently is often what leads to otherwise intelligent and capable students falling behind. I might have some more thoughts on this soon.
Going back to your point about teaching morphological processing in the ESL classroom, Sean, it’s true the kids sometimes misinterpret the rules and combine when they shouldn’t. I think it works a bit better with remedial or LD native English speaking students who have a stronger grasp on the rules of where to apply certain prefixes and suffixes.
My students used to make spelling mistakes while adding the wrong prefix or suffix.They were primary school students,who came up with errors like handfulls, pencils box,because both hands are full it became fulls,and they keep more then two pencils in box,it became pencilsbox.
ReplyDeleteOnce a student came up stating
S) Teacher don't change my seat in classroom?
I ) Why not?
S) I and my friend are having more friendhood....
(Confused by brotherhood)
While teaching names of months, they got confused by May, July ,June etc Since they don't have following rhyme, Like January-February....and the last four with -ber in the end.
In Hindi language the "o" sound is used in the end of the word to show plural eg: KITAAB (Book) = KITAAB + O = KITAABO (Books)
Many times this use of "O" came up like :
CHAIR + O = CHAIRO (To signify Chairs).
Thus instead of using English rule for plural words, they used Hindi language rule.
I think English rules are taught at schools,while Hindi rules they pickup at an early age,due to more exposure.Due to this they keep mixing the rules at initial school days.
They use the "free roots" in contextual way.
Often people in Korea call me a NEWER WIFE, (Like JK is going to have a newest wife soon !!)
And that I must stay at home during summers,because "Some days are hotly horrible."
I assume that L1 transfer/interference have equal role in these errors.
Swati, how old were the students in this example?
DeleteOne of the things that I found frustrating with this text is that while it has some great ideas for learning vocab/reading comprehension/etc, it wasn't clear to me how to use it in an ESL setting. Anyone have book recommendations for morphological teaching for low level non-native students?!>! I can see the value in this kind of approach, but I'm struggling to think of an application that I could use in my classes now that wouldn't go way over the kids' heads.
I do vaguely remember a few times in Japan when I tried to explain certain prefixes to adult students, but the challenge with English is that the roots are in European and classical languages that most Asian learners have very little experience with...
I can also relate to Sean's post about learning languages. I had to study Latin for 2 years in middle school and I think I learned more about English language in those classes than I ever did in English class.
RE: learning Korean - it's really frustrating to me when someone says "Oh, don't you know xxxxxx, it comes from the Chinese yyyyyyyy and zzzzz. Don't you that?"
For those who know Konglish, I'm sure this is a similar reason why it arises, it just seems more natural when taking the L1 into account.
DeleteEvan the Chinese (hanja) use in Korean is so pervasive it gets annoying. Japanese have a huge leg on everyone because of grammar similarities in the lower levels, but then Chinese soar ahead later on.
Big C culture publications still use a lot of hanja and even my coworkers often put it in brackets beside vocabulary words when teaching Korean equivalents of English vocabulary, so they don't have to clarify and can focus on the English. This is probably where they question you for not knowing the Chinese equivalent, they are simply used to teaching vocabulary that way. It would be comparable to a native English speaker not knowing something like vis-a-vis, RSVP, de facto, pro rate etc. although with hundreds of more examples and the guilt of actually being expected to know it despite that it's written in Chinese.