Morphemes & Stuff

Please forgive any errors...this is from a reading response I did for 227.

Emergent Literacy:

Children begin to develop written language knowledge from the moment they are first exposed to reading and writing at home during their preschool years.

Reading Readiness:

Traditional view of reading instruction that assumes that children must be able to perform certain auditory, visual, psychomotor, and linguistic tasks in order to show the maturity needed for reading instruction.

Phoneme:

The smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in meaning in a language.

A member of the set of the smallest units of speech that serve to distinguish one utterance from another in a language or dialect - the /p/ of English pat and the /f/ of English fat are two different phonemes.

Morpheme

A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. (Minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units .)

Grapheme:

The letter or letter combination that represents a sound (phoneme).

Phonemic Awareness:

Awareness of individual sounds that constitute spoken words.

Phonics:

A method of teaching people to read in which they are taught to recognize the sounds that letters represent.

Onset:

The initial consonant in a word or syllable, followed by a vowel-consonant sequence (the rime).

Ex.: gain

g – onset
ain- rime

Digraphs:

Two consonants together that make one sound (th, ch, ph).

Blends:

Two consonants together that blend their sounds (cl, bl, tr, cr, pr).


What is the critical period hypothesis?

Linguist Eric Lenneberg (1964) stated that the crucial period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He claimed that if no language is learned before then, it could never be learned in a normal and fully functional sense." (Wikipedia, 2006) This theory became known as The Critical Period Hypothesis and it refers to the specific time period in which language learning best occurs.

Prescriptive grammar

Rules of grammar as prescribed by grammarians; i.e., what the rules should be as opposed to what they are.

Descriptive grammar

Observation of the use of grammar, with no value judgment as to what the rules should be.