Sounds and letters and words and sentences and stories
Crosslinguistic Pedagogy and the Confessions of a Late-blooming Francophile
Confession: when I was a kid in rural Nova Scotia, I wasn’t a fan of learning French. In fact, I hated it and dropped French class as soon as I had completed the minimum requirements. I have come to regret this choice, and I don’t fully understand why I made it, though likely there were…
The cot-caught merger: a dialectal difference and early literacy instruction
Language is always evolving, with new words (bingeable, superspreader), new expressions (I can’t even), and even shifting syntax (Have you any? vs Do you have any?) and grammar (the fading subjunctive: If I were…). But the main topic of interest today is shifts in pronunciation. The way we pronounce words changes slowly over time, often…
A boat by any other name
With the exception of sound effect words (called onomatopoeia like sizzle, beep), speech sounds are arbitrarily attached to the meanings of words. There’s not really a reason why a dog is called dog and not some other string of sounds like bop. And as Juliet famously said, a rose by any other name would smell…
So many muches! Grammar errors and what they tell us about language development
When kids first begin talking, typically at around 12 months of age, they of course stick to the basics— very short phrases that convey basic wants, needs, and social routines. Mama. More. Up. Hi! All-done. Milk. Doggy. Bye-bye. Oops! These are mostly one-word phrases and are not pronounced perfectly. Then, typically when children are between…
Orthographic Mapping: how we learn to read so fast!
Updated November 26, 2022 Once we know how to read, we read fast, recognizing a word in a fraction of a second. In fact, for most people, reading is not just easy, it’s automatic. You can’t stop yourself from reading words that you see; they just jump off of the page and into your brain…
Looking for the Helpers
Are you feeling pretty overwhelmed these days? Me too. Amidst all the confusion and grief of the past several weeks, many people have quoted the late, great Mr. Rogers, who once shared his mother’s wise words: Besides the unwavering energy of my own two little kids, another thing that keeps me going these days is…
How Babies Learn Words
These are rough times. If you’re like me, you’re spending too much time reading the news and fretting about the uncertainty of the months ahead. That, and trying to keep the kids from seriously wounding each other. Kind of like our collective reaction to the coronavirus, my kids’ disputes tend to escalate rather quickly. So,…
How We Read- Keep it Simple
For decades, especially leading up to the 2000s, educators and researchers have debated how children should be taught to read, and how exactly the process of reading works in our brains. The discussion has been at times intense and impassioned, which is understandable given what is at stake. After all, we live in the age…
Get Ready to Read!
When you think about the first steps in teaching young children to read, you likely think about starting with the letters- their names and their sounds. Teaching the ABCs can start any time a preschooler is ready, but there are actually a couple of other things we can do before Kindergarten to set the stage…
And I have an ice cream truck at my house.
One of my favourite things about preschoolers’ language development is the emergence of decontextualized language. This is when kids start to talk about ideas outside of the present moment, or ideas beyond the “here-and-now.” This could mean talking about past events, such as “kitty scratch me” or future events, like “We go to the park?”…
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