cc: Re: analysis: unhappiness

[DUBARTELL]

Hello All,

I think this issue is not perhaps one of analysis or intuition, but one of K-12 teaching/learning.  Many teachers provide exercises over the school years that reinforce prefixation with less lesson time given to the suffixes.  My students can easily explain the meanings of   pre-, anti-, and ex-, but are often unable to explain the meaning of -ness, -tion-, and -ence, for example, as readily.  I know from teaching student teachers that many of their grammar lesson plans focus primarily on prefixes.  (In addition, some students do not realize that suffixes appear in dictionaries).

I must also wonder if the stress difficulties are related to the possible infrequency of such lessons in the K-12 curricula.  Very generally, many college students are better at those grammatical exercises with which they may have at least some familiarity from their K-12 experience.

Regards,
Deborah DuBartell


On Wednesday, September 08, 2010 11:26 AM, Johanna Rubba wrote:
>
>Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:26:29 -0700
>From: Johanna Rubba
>To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
>cc: 
>Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
>
>One thing that consistently occurs in my intro linguistics classes is
>that at least half of my students do not analyze complex words the
>way a linguist would -- many would analyze "unhappiness" as "un" +
>"happiness." They make such analyses over and over. It makes one
>wonder, of course, about how much native-speaker intuition is in
>agreement with some linguistic analyses. I can *feel* that the
>analysis is [[un-happy]-ness], but, apparently, large numbers of
>native speakers cannot.
>
>Another thing I often find is that many students cannot locate either
>primary or (especially) secondary stress in words. This is very
>bizarre, considering that they produce the stresses correctly and
>hear them correctly in others' speech. So many are unsuccessful at
>this that I have stopped requiring them to find stress in words on
>tests. I give them tricks like singing the word and monitoring for
>the highest-pitched syllable, but the tricks don't work. That many
>students can't be tone-deaf.
>
>Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
>Professor, Linguistics
>Linguistics Minor Advisor
>English Dept.
>Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
>San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
>Ofc. Tel. : 805-756-2184
>Dept. Tel.: 805-756-2596
>Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
>E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
>URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
>
>





Deborah DuBartell, Ph.D.
    Professor of Linguistics
    Department of English
    295 Meadville St.
    Centennial Hall 238
    Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
    Edinboro, PA 16444

tele:  814.732.2269
web:  users.edinboro.edu/DuBartell