Little Linguists

I spend so much time thinking about thinking, and language learning, I wonder how things get done.  Yesterday, I was reading with my 5-year-old, and we were noticing some words that sound similar, with only one sound different (not just typical rhymes, which are another favorite topic), but also words such as 'friend' and 'Fred.'

As literate adults, it requires not a second thought to say 'n' is the sound that differentiates these two, but for an emergent reader, a 5-year old, it takes quite a bit more repetition of the words to think about it.  I could have just shown her both words and it would have only taken a moment for her to notice the 'n,' though we would have had a tedious and irrelevant discussion about the appearance of 'i' there despite the same vowel sound: /ɛ/.  But I didn't want to focus on the orthography.  I wanted her to concentrate on the sounds, trying to pinpoint which sound is different.  The first consideration is keeping something like that fun.  As most teachers of young learners know, keeping the experience fun, especially if the topic is somewhat abstract, is crucial or you can just toss it out.  So, we went back and forth, saying each word slowly.  She started pausing in the middle of the word, listening to the vowel, and said [ɛ]!  "I think we're really close to it," I encouraged and said 'friend' again, holding the [n] just a little.  She said the sound then, suddenly and excitedly: "[n]"!

What is the point?  A focal point of my thinking in education right now is on building conceptual frameworks, albeit somewhat hazy and unclear to begin with, of various possibilities of interpreting information within a given subject.  I guess this may be a 'road map' in the parlance of our times.   So, in the case above, instead of only looking at /n/ as a letter on a piece of paper, I want to consider it as a phoneme, as an auditory experience, and then as a physical experience, too.  Stella and I made faces at each other, making the [n] sound exaggeratedly both in the word 'friend' and by itself.  When we can consider incoming information in various ways (as a letter on the page, as a particular sound, as a physical gesture with specific sensations in the articulatory organs, we build a more ample foundation, a broader framework with which to accommodate new information.

In terms of language learning, this is of vital importance since you are practicing a new language in all its forms (written, oral, literary, soundbite, etc.).  If you focus just on the details of input as it is written (our tendency as older language learners), you are bound to come up against limitations in interpreting new information.  Many languages have no corresponding grapheme to a given phoneme.  If a learner has the ability to notice and isolate small differences in incoming sounds, they will more quickly accommodate new sounds.  Where is my research for this?  While this is more of a logical deduction than an empirically supported observation, it is also the latter, but the empirical evidence is not documented!

Similar to the above scenario, if we teach adult learners the concept of vowel space, the notions of how the tongue moves inside the mouth, jaw lowering and raising, to produce different sounds, we find that they have an easier time making adjustments to accommodate new vowel sounds.  Without this conceptual basis to think about vowels, many learners have nearly zero experience with conceptualizing vowels.  For most, it is a letter on a piece of paper, or the sound in a word with no thought to the corresponding physical gesture.  Of course, to open such a discussion, learners should consider on their own what makes different vowel sounds, and how vowels differ from consonants, physically.  With these ideas internalized, it becomes easier to imagine how to make modifications to realize new vowel sounds.  Then, autonomous learning is more likely.