Orthography and the duel between Phonics & Graphophonics

I liked the refresher on the subject of orthography because I had forgotten some of the basic information about the logographic system (especially how it has developed in China) and the syllabic system. I think that it is really interesting (I use that word waaay too much in my blogs I think) that even though both of our texts contain a ton of information we still are only scratching the surface of these subjects. It just goes to show how complicated language studies really are.

I especially liked the Freeman chapters this week because much of this information was new to me. Some of the spelling "rules" that were displayed I had never heard of before, but I think that is because my knowledge of English orthography is mostly from graphophonics instead of the phonics based learning style. Because I was not taught with the phonics method I have a large bias against it as well as the "scientific" approach that was described in Chapter 5. I know that a little bit of phonics teaching is ok, but I don't think it should be the main focus. Many native speakers do not learn this way, so I was wondering if it has ANY advantages for non-native speakers of English or if it's just a simplified way of explaining the English spelling system because it seems to bypass language acquisition and just head straight for language learning? I like the quote from Smith on page 135 when he says phonics, "may seem obvious, just as it is obvious that the earth is flat... Obvious, but false". The chapter then goes on to discuss how we read in chunks instead of each individual sound and I think that it is important for non-native speaking students to understand this because if they go solely with the bottom-up approach (phonics) then I think they will have a very difficult time acquiring a good reading rate, which would also include the top-down approach.

Finally I'd like to mention the rule on page 138, "When to vowels go walking. the first one does the talking". The reason why I wanted to mention this is because this was the only "rule" that the Freemans mention that I have encountered in my English studies. I was amazed to find out that, "Clymer found 309 words, like bead, that followed the rule but 377 others like chief, that do not" (that's less than half the time when the rule actually works)! I was amazed, but not surprised. I feel as though Graphophonics wins this fight no contest, but that phonics and some investigations into spelling patterns has its place even if it is sitting the remote corner of the room with its dunce cap on.

A note about Feb. 5th

Last week we covered the subject of phonology. We started the class by deciephering a text written in the IPA format in small groups. This activity was challenging because we only recieved chunks of the text, but most of the class did pretty well. I thought all the the activities that we did were interesting (even the ones before class) because they were close to the same exact activities that I did in my 'Introduction to Linguistics' class when I was an undergrad. I think that taking a second linguistics class will only help me to better understand the English language because much of the information that I've forgotten will come back to me. We also addressed some of the problems and difficulties that students were having during our class, but I still don't think that everyone is on the same page. Being that this is an online class makes things even harder, but I hope that we'll all be able to learn a lot in this class.

Phonotactics and general phonology

In the two chapters that we read this week I thought that the phonotactics portion of chapter three was interesting because I had never heard of it before. I knew that as a native English speaker I had acquired many of these rules (such as the no word starting with the /ng/ sound rule), but I never really thought about how I know if a word is correct or not because I just knew it instinctively. Somehow this made me remember a show I had seen many years ago called "Ripley's Believe it or Not". On this show they had the world's fastest speaking woman (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) who had the ability to recognize chunks of words/phrases together instead of each word separately. This allowed her to speak them much faster, especially after she eliminated the pauses between words. To me it sounded like gibberish but after they slowed it down on a computer you could tell that she was in fact speaking each word (although she had no pauses). Even though this had little to do with phonotactics I looked up a video of her online (her name is Fran Capo) and found that it had a lot to do with linguistics so I wanted to share the video: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6zPikfOEs

This video had more to do with the tongue twisters portion of the chapter because since Fran's brain has the ability to deal with many patterns at once she is able to speak much faster without too much distortion of her pronunciation. The only problem here of course is that at her top speed no one but a computer can understand her. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the similar skill that many poets, musicians, and rappers possess since they are able to speak more rapidly or in a more patterned way than we do in normal speech. I assume their skill has something to do with this ability to recognize and produce complex language patterns but maybe there is something else that is going on as well?