Advanced English Skills

Language Log Nonword literacy Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc.  In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus: "as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here) "contribute to children's ability to learn new words"  (here) "a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here) etc., etc., etc. I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand. I was brought up short by an article syndicated in today's New Zealand press: the reported evidence is based on children’s ability to read non-words, and their ability to read words was not consistently assessed. The report suggests that the approaches are successful in teaching children to blend sounds together to decode words. What is not clear yet is if learning to decode benefited children’s writing and comprehension more than current methods. There's a 'Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills', used internationally, where 'decoding' means being able to sound out words on the page. Seems to be the Bryant ref'd on this wikip. Then the scenario Dr. Jesson seems to be highlighting is that learners can 'read' a text in the sense of sound it out; but not understand it. Then neither will that help their writing. The situation is particularly critical for newly-arrived immigrant families, where English is not their first language. NZ education has essentially no ability to teach in any other language. The recently published "independent evaluations of the various structured approaches " seems to be this. How is literacy education assessed in the U.S.A.? Particularly in districts where English is not the predominant language. And how in Sinitic cultures, where there's no hope of 'sounding out' from the text? The back story: New Zealand has a new Government as of late last year. They're now getting into their stride of changing everything the previous administration had initiated, including of course education. This week they've announced a new initiative. What this 'new' masks is that by cutting in-progress initiatives, they're effectively reducing the overall education budget for literacy skills. 'Expert commentary' here — including from Dr. Jesson. The idea of "sounding out" nonsinoglyphs made me chuckle.  It reminded me of Xu Bing's "A Book from the Sky" that consists solely of characters that look real but that he had made up out of thin air.  These nonsense characters drove literate Chinese readers mad with frustration when they tried to make sense of them.  They also remind me of the "junk characters" we recently discussed, which — although "real" (they exist in some hyper arcane glossary or occurred once in the whole of history in an obscure manuscript, etc.) — their sound and meaning are known not even to one out of a million literate persons.  Do Xu Bing's made-up glyphs and the Kangxi's junk characters have an analogous function to the nonwords of English reading theory? Selected readings * "Unhinged on phonics" (7/26/07) * "Phonics" (12/30/06) * "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12) * "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) * "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16) * "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12) * "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12) * "How to generate fake Chinese characters automatically" (12/30/15) * "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24) ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day Word of the Day: demarcation This word has appeared in 26 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence? ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Idiom of the Day the granddaddy of them all The biggest, oldest, most impressive, or most respected person or thing of his, her, or its kind. Watch the video ➖ @EngSkills ➖

debacle

Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub jock an athlete, sportsman ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub sit up (2) to not go to bed until later than usual ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day formicary Definition: (noun) A nest of ants. Synonyms: anthill. Usage: Hours after accidentally stepping on a formicary, she was still picking stray ants off of her jeans. Discuss ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log Brown Revisited A couple of months ago, I told you about a project to recreate the Supreme Court oral arguments associated with Brown v. Board of Education ("Spontaneous SCOTUS", 3/2/2024): Years ago, Jerry Goldman (then at Northwestern) created the oyez.org website as a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is the most complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and full-text Supreme Court opinions He rescued decades of tapes and transcripts from the National Archives, digitized and improved them, and arranged the website's interactive presentations of the available recordings. Jiahong Yuan and I played a role, by devising and validating a program to identify which justice was speaking when (See "Speaker Identification on the Scotus Corpus", 2008). More recently, Jerry has inspired an effort to recreate oral arguments from famous cases that took place before the recording system was installed, starting with Brown v. Board of Education. Rejecting the idea of producing "deep fakes" using the existing transcripts and extant recordings of the justices involved, he and his colleagues decided to create what we might call "shallow fakes", where actors will perform (selections from) the transcripts, and a voice morphing system will then be used to make their recordings sound like the target speakers. The recreated clips will be embedded in explanatory material. All the scripts have been written, and in a few months, you'll be able to hear the results — which I expect will be terrific. And here it is, at https://brown.oyez.org! There's also a YouTube video "How We Recreated the Brown v. Board of Education Oral Arguments": A few earlier posts where the overall oyez.org project came up: "Fun with co-voting percentages", 12/1/2006 "Stress in Supreme Court oral arguments", 6/17/2008 "Mining a year of speech", 1/19/2010 "Big Data in the humanities and social sciences", 5/31/2012 "NPR: oyez.org finishes Supreme Court oral arguments project", 4/25/2013 "Hearing interactions", 2/28/2018 "Vocalizations of wolves and justices", 2/17/2023 FWIW, I was on the advisory committee for the Brown Revisited project: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BrownAdvisoryCommittee.png ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day escritoire Definition: (noun) A writing table; a desk. Synonyms: secretaire, writing table, secretary. Usage: In the large shining mahogany escritoire Mr. Osborne had a drawer especially devoted to his son's affairs and papers. Discuss ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day Word of the Day: innate This word has appeared in 107 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence? ➖ @EngSkills ➖