English

[Jon898]

You might need to explain what yaba is RS, for those less widely-travelled than yourself.

Or have them click the link?  Just sayin'

Jon

[Chris Morris]

You might need to explain what yaba is RS, for those less widely-travelled than yourself.

Best regards,


Joe

See
http://youtu.be/2s13X66BFd8

[joe cassidy]

So that was a link ? I thought that yaba was just underlined to indicate that it was the mot clef in "Yaba dabba do".

Sorry for being a bit thick.

Joe

[NeMo]

What annoys me is when people put an aspirant on the single letter H. It is spelt and pronounced aitch. As a northerner, I often drop my aitches, so when people add them when the shouldn't it stands out.

One problem here is phonics. Without opening a GIGANTIC can o' worms, phonics is meant to make language and writing skills easier to learn. Instead of learning the letters, the child is taught sounds (phonemes). So "cat" is a k-sound, an ah-sound, and a tah-sound. According to the experts, this works better than teaching the spelling as "c", "a", "t" because all too often in English the letter of the alphabet has no obvious connection to the sound.*

So if you were spelling "hat", you'd have a huh-sound, an ah-sound, and a tah-sound. For children brought up on phonics, the letter H should logically be pronounced 'haitch' to match the "huh-sound", and I think that carries over from primary school into adult life.

The parenting problem for me is that I learned to read before going to school, and my daughter, though not even two, has books she looks at with us. There is a HUGE link between children reading at home with their parents and then going on to do well at school. But primary schools would prefer parents to either use phonics to teach their children before school, or else not to teach their children any reading of any kind. Supposedly, if I teach the ABCs as I learned them in the early 70s, that'll only confuse my little darling when she has to learn a whole new way of reading!

I teach in a secondary school, and let me tell you, there kids there DO NOT like phonics at all. Smart teenagers find this approach demeaning, and insist you spell words out properly. But there is good evidence it helps the weaker kids access literacy in primary schools especially, and for that reason, phonics is likely here to stay, even though some English teachers don't think it works when you look at the big picture of literacy across all ages.

Cheers, NeMo


*The famous example is "ghoti", a made-up word that is pronounced as "fish", the "gh" as in "enough", the "o" as in "women", and the "ti" as in "action". Obviously this is cobblers, because all those odd alphabet uses stem from the etymology of the words enough, women, and action. In other words, there's a historical reason why they're spelled that way that makes perfect sense. But for children, especially less able children, English is notoriously difficult to learn. Phonics is meant to minimise this problem.

[woodbury22uk]

The conversion from phonics to reading written English must be a challenge for some children too. For example, there are many place names which are pronounced completely differently from the way they are spelt. Godmanchester was once local to me, and I always pause when reading Happisburgh.

I was brought up in Kent and had a very good knowledge of places around the county. Imagine my surprise when I was talking to a French student travelling to England to study at a language school in Kent. I could not make out where she was going to college. It was in a town called "Ee- zer". Think of it as Geezer without the G. Eventually she wrote down the name for me which turned out to be Hythe.

[jpendle]

So that was a link ? I thought that yaba was just underlined to indicate that it was the mot clef in "Yaba dabba do".

Sorry for being a bit thick.

Joe

"Mot Clef"!!!!!!!!

Deviation, the title of the thread is 'English' 

John P

[dannyboy]

So "cat" is a k-sound, an ah-sound, and a tah-sound.

Put like that, it sounds like catarrh, which I sometimes suffer from - or even Quatar, which is somewhere out east. As I have said before - I love the English language 

[jpendle]

There's no 'U' in Qatar.
You're thinking of Q8

John P

[dannyboy]

There's no 'U' in Qatar.
You're thinking of Q8

John P

Just testing - you get the prize for spotting the mistake first  . And no, I wasn't thinking of oil, (https://www.q8oils.com/). 

[NeMo]

This is absolutely a criticism of the phonics method. In the Guardian article I linked above, the example is given of the words like paws, pause, pores and pours that would all be 'spelled' phonically in different ways, but spoken out loud in much the same way, so there's plenty of scope for confusion right there.

But the experts in the field do insist phonics is, overall, better. It isn't perfect by any means though. The alternative is just doing what a lot native English speakers do, and that's to accept the oddities of English spelling without really understanding why they're there. Take the nightmarish -ough sequence of letters which can be pronounced at least six different ways! My generation simply learned that particular words were pronounced particular ways, and "enough" was different to "through" which was different to "nought" and so on.

Cheers, NeMo

So "cat" is a k-sound, an ah-sound, and a tah-sound.

Put like that, it sounds like catarrh, which I sometimes suffer from - or even Quatar, which is somewhere out east. As I have said before - I love the English language 

[railsquid]

Hence the link 

[Zogbert Splod]

"ghoughpteighbteau" to the lot of ya!

[dannyboy]

"ghoughpteighbteau"

That's one of the reasons I like coming back to Yorkshire 

[Greybeema]

I could read when I went to school however (note how I'm using however as a conjunction) when I got to school it was insisted upon that I be taught the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) as a phonetic alphabet, which I duly learned. 

After I had been using ITA for a couple of years we swapped back to the traditional alphabet and I had difficulty transitioning back.  I had to go through the whole remedial reading rigmarole for a further year and still to this day lack confidence in reading out loud. 

I have several curmudgeon like instincts.  Working in IT the word I hate is Methodology.  It is not a methodology, it is a method.  Methodology is the study of methods.  We are not studying them, we are using them (or not as the case maybe)...

[Yet_Another]

Ah, you need to report that into your Senior Colleague/Leader, so that they can transition at pace to a new way of working.