sumetary

[Paul Johnston]

Tom:
Another error in your discussion.  I taught an applied linguistics
approach to reading acquisition for many years, using a whole
language slant.  Now I don't want to get into that whole argument,
but "whole language" is not the same as "whole word" or "look say".
It's focus is not on using only visual cues for word recognition,
but, basically, on everything the child can throw at an unknown word,
INCLUDING (but not exclusively, and preferably not first) phonics
knowledge.  You use the semantic and syntactic context of the
surrounding known words, kids' background knowledge about texts and
about the subject of the text, visual shape and phonics (as a tie-
breaker).  There's a lot of myths about the approach, and yes,
phonics is essential at some point.  But it's become such a political
bugaboo that few people really know what the real researchers say on
either side, just the popularizers, the politicians, and sellers of
kits.  And they have AGENDAS.
Personally, I got a mixture of approaches when I learned to read,
which I learned before school.  I'd say my parents' reading to me and
with me, alerting me to the oddness and interesting aspects of words
and language, letting me play with writing and typing at age 4, and
going from 1st to 8th at a school that had a tradition of being a
John Dewey school made me a good reader (and a future linguist),
though as a lover of word puzzles, I liked the phonics exercises I
got.  Dick & Jane bored me.  I'd have rather read some of the
children's book series we got outside of school, and luckily I had
teachers who let us bring some of them in.  I'm one of those loonies
who read the World Book (and anything else you threw at me) cover-to-
cover, so I probably can't talk about reading from my own
experience.  But it seems like "different strokes for different
folks" holds true in reading.  Some kids are very analytical.  Some
kids learn globally.
  And I really don't see, by the way, why the tiny differences
between accents that exist should be stamped out.  I can understand
most Alabamans (or Californians or Mainers or British Columbians)
just fine, even where there's potential phonemic overlap.  If someone
from Toronto says "I'm going [@ut]", I know that last word doesn't
designate something that horses eat, because of semantic and
syntactic context, even though, to me, [@ut]="oat".    Same with
"block" and "black" here.  Labov found the confusion happened mostly
when the words were spoken in isolation. That's what made his tests
so interesting, because his listeners guessed the word wrong when out
of context, and then, when the whole sentence was supplied, saw what
was really intended. (And I've heard several different pronunciations
of his name--I think he says [l@'b^v].)  Even in the UK, where accent
differences are far greater, increased contact between people from
different areas resulted in leveling, even if that didn't necessarily
mean converging on Received Pronunciation. As long as we're trying to
get along, we naturally try to communicate, editing out what might
not be understood and substituting things we believe to be more
widespread--and largely unconsciously at that.  So what's the deal,
if that's all we have to do?

Yours,
Paul Johnston
On Mar 31, 2009, at 10:55 AM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: sumetary
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> So, Tom, are you going to tell 100 million or so proud Southerners
> that they have to start pronouncing final /r/ and that they can no
> longer say /raad/ for "ride"?  Or will you perhaps tell Eastern New
> Englanders to drop their intrusive /r/ and stop pahking cahs?  You
> will, of course, require most of the population west of the
> Mississippi to distinguish caught and cot.  There are those who would
> legislate English as the official language of the US and the only
> language to be used in matters of government.  You're taking this a
> step farther.  You want an official dialect.  But where is your
> evidence that dialect differences have caused disruption to civil
> peace in this country?  Most of us are bidialectal, at least
> receptively.  We understand with ease more than one dialect of English
> and may even be able to speak more than one well.
>
> Sound change is a fact of language and always has been.  No one has
> ever been able to stop it.  Forcing a particular pronunciation works
> in very specialized, narrow venues.  When my choir sings Latin
> religious texts, I train them in the 18th c. Roman pronunciation that
> is standard for Church Latin, unless we sing a setting by a German or
> Finnish composer, in which case we use the pronunciations of Latin
> that are standard in those traditions.  Even singing in English, I try
> hard to get them not to use /r/ after a vowel because of what it does
> to vocal resonance.  They let me get away with all this, but if I
> tried to tell them they had to speak everyday English with choral
> diction they'd probably find a new choir director.
>
> Sound change has always gone on and always will.  We've been studying
> it with some precision for about two centuries now.  Even the Northern
> Cities Vowel Shift is probably more than a century old, so it was
> going on long before whole language approaches to reading came on the
> scene and beginning reading was taught with some variety of phonics.
> Of course, I remember hearing a Southern Indiana teacher telling her
> students that some people claimed that "pin" and "pen" were pronounced
> differently but that we all knew that wasn't really so.
>
> Herb
>
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Laurence Horn
> <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: sumetary
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ----------
>>
>> At 6:54 AM +0000 3/31/09, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>>> Thanks, Herb, for that interesting clip in which Bill ~Lubbaaf talks
>>> about the Great Lake Northern Cities Vowel Shift (for short vowels).
>>> (I didn't see his last name spelled but I can spell it phonetically
>>> in truespel).  He says that around the great lakes cities certain
>>> vowels are changing.  This area contains cities such as Cleveland,
>>> Detroit, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffaloe (about 34M people).  It used
>>> to be the USA English standard pronunciation for media.  Some
>>> examples are:
>>>
>>> saying "block" the same as "black"
>>> saying "buses" the same as "bosses"
>>>
>>> Other short vowels are swapping too.  ~Lubbaaf says we are growing
>>> apart linguistically even with massive media exposure.  To me this
>>> is a bad thing.  It should be changed and can be changed.
>>>
>>> I speculate that the main reason for this is that many schools have
>>> dropped phonetic or phonic instruction for teaching reading and gone
>>> with "whole language" or "whole word" approach.  This forbids
>>> teaching the alphabetic principle that letters stand for sounds, so
>>> kids are taught that they have to learn words visually, and thus
>>> pronunciation is not linked to spelling and can vary capriciously.
>>> Huge mistake.
>>>
>>
>> And of course we know from the findings of historical linguistics
>> that there's a strong correlation between the presence or absence of
>> phonic instruction and the likelihood of sound change...   ;-)
>>
>>
>> LH
>>
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