Language Change homework

1876 was a huge change for English language, Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, this means people can communicate privately. There was not a common way for people to talk on the phone.

When the telephone was invented, “Hello” was a very new word to the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary says that “hello” became a common part of English language in 1827.  And instead of being used as a greeting, “hello” had a very different meaning.  “Hello” was used to bring notice to something or to express surprise.

Eg: "Hello! Your horse has stepped in flowers."

However Bell thought "Ahoy" would be the perfect greeting when talking on the telephone. But this did not catch on, instead books were written in how to use the telephone and suggested to greet people with 'hello' however people in the UK pronounced it 'Hullo'.

As phones became more and more popular this greeting of 'hello' was being used to greet people in person, where as greetings such as 'good day' were normally used in a face to face situation the word 'hello' was being used more often. And now today 'hello' is the most common British greeting.

However some magazines suggested saying 'Hallau' to answer the telephone and 'That is all' to end the telephone call. However this never caught on, 'Goodbye' is a established word used to end a meeting/conversation, and at the time this didn't change. (Still today it is the most popular word to use to end a conversation.)  However these days we have lots of different phrases/words to end a conversation.

Eg: "see you", "catch you later". Or goodbye being shortened to just "bye".  Not sure when this shortening happened but it could be when texting came out as people shorten words when texting.

 

As 'Hello' was originally used to express surprise or bring the attention to something, and now is used as a greeting, I think this is synchronous. However I don't think it is used anymore to bring a person's notice to something I think we use "Excuse me" for example "Excuse me, you've dropped your keys." But I do think we use it for surprise, if you see someone in the pub who hasn't seen you, you might go over and say "Hello, fancy seeing you here", although this could still be seen as a way of greeting. So perhaps 'Hello' has gone through narrowing as there are fewer senses of the word than it used to. This may be an interesting discussion as I'm not sure what language change technique it has gone through.

Paragraph from my analysis.

I didn’t expect to see any imperatives either, as they can come across bossy and the audience may react badly to them. However the descriptions from the 1900s all repeat the imperative ‘Think… Oxford bags and Bay City Rollers’ The stative verb and added ellipsis gets the reader to take in the imperative and pause to imagine this certain time period and what was going on at this particular time. The imperative cleverly puts the garment into context while getting the reader to imagine themselves in this certain time period. 

Interesting..

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1136904/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Isnt-time-Golliwog-Squad-finally-grew-up.html

Childrens reading.

There is a debate on which method should be used when teaching children how to read. These methods are:

Look and say,
Children learn the shapes of words instead of breaking them down phonologically. They recognise the whole word or sentence, children are normally presented with a card that has the word on and will most likely have a picture that relates to the word so as to help them link them together.

Phonics/synthetic phonics,
This is the breaking down of words and understanding the sounds of each letter and then combining them to create a word. Normally the caregiver will start with simple words such as 'dog' and then develop onto more complex words such as 'eat'. The child will need to know the alphabet before using the phonics method.
This method however has been criticised as the English language has many different ways to pronounce a sound that may be spelt the same (eg: cough, through, ect.).

Jeanne Chall identified six stages of reading development. She studied children from toddlers to age 18. She found is interesting that our motivation for reading changes.

Stage	Description	Age (years)	Key Characteristics
0	Pre-reading and pseudo-reading	Up to 6	'pretend' reading, turning pages, repeating stories. some letter and word recognition predicting single words or the next stage of a story
1	Initial reading and decoding	6-7	Reading simple texts containing high frequency lexis. Estimated 600 words understood
2	Confirmation and fluency	7-8	Reading texts more quickly accurately and fluently. Pay attention to meanings of words and texts. Estimated 3000 words understood
3	Reading for learning	9-14	Reading for knowledge and info. becomes motivation
4	Multiplicity and complexity	14-17	Responding critically to what they read and analysing texts
5	Construction and reconstruction.	18+	Reading selectively and forming opinions about what they have read.

 

Reading schedules.
They are purposely staged in different levels of difficulty to help children stretch and aquire lexical and semantic knowledge and grammatical understanding. The aim to build children's confidence and show examples of things such as good behaviour and politeness strategies which helps children develop pragmatic understanding.

Key features:
Lexical repetition
Syntactical repetition of structures
Simple verbs
One sentence per line
Anaphoric referencing
Limited use of modifiers
Text image cohesion

http://www.parentdish.co.uk/kids/how-your-child-will-learn-to-read-at-school-and-what-you-can-do-to-help-reading-at-home/
http://www.theschoolrun.com/school-reading-schemes-explained
http://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19812961
http://www.education.com/reference/article/reading-development-stages-Chall/

Children's phonological development.

Have to remember every child is different which means speech will develop at different stages.

 

 

 The table suggests that children develop two consonant sounds together a lot later than a consonant sound on its own. From the transcripts I have looked at from both Evie and Zach they do find it a lot harder to pronounce words like ‘through’ correctly, however it will be interesting to know at what age they do correctly pronounce it to see if it reflects the table.

At about 4-6 months a child may begin to start trying to create certain sounds mainly consonants and start experimenting with their tone of voice from growls to squeaks.

8 months the child may start to use their tone of voice to mean different things and they start babbling and using certain sounds together.

When the child reaches about 18 months old it should have a vocabulary of between 50-100 words which will most likely be words they are used to and from their common surroundings and things they are familiar with.

At 2 the child should be able to pair words together eg: ‘mummy chair’. Also asks a lot of questions ‘why mummy’. From the table we can see that by three the harder sounds of ‘g’ and ‘k’ are used which suggests at this stage the child will be experimenting in trying to create the sound. They are probably harder for the child as it uses muscles they may not have developed well enough in the mouth.

Doing certain tasks with children can encourage them to speak and introduces them to adult language.

At 3 the child is starting to use sentences and starts understanding and using pronouns such as ‘they’ starting to use tenses and plurals even if they are wrong ‘swimmed’ ‘sheeps’ they understand the basic rule.

Between 4-5 children can talk in more sentences and speak of events that have happened to them and their friends from school/pre-school. They are starting to use harder sounds in their language such as ‘pl’ ‘st’.

About 6 children stop clipping verbs such as ‘running’ as they manage to develop the ‘ng’ sound. Children tend to clip the verb to ‘runnin’ as they have managed to create the ‘ng’ sound. This could be because the muscles are still developing and strengthening in their jaw and tongue.

The ‘th’ is one of the last for a child to pronounce correctly at about 7 years old.

If children can’t pronounce the sound properly they may substitute in a sound that they can pronounce eg ‘pish instead of fish’ because the ‘f’ sound is normally developed later then the ‘p’ sound.

http://www.kidshealth.org.nz/speech-sound-development
http://www.home-speech-home.com/baby-speech-development.html
http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a6573/developmental-milestones-talking
http://www.asha.org/slp/schools/prof-consult/norms/
http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/12.htm
http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/23.htm
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/behaviour_development/a435354-speech-development-the-th-sound
http://www.speaklistenplay.com/2013/01/speech-sound-development.html

Zach's Transcript Analysis.

-Gives praise 'very good' tells him it’s a good drawing, might encourage him to do activities like drawing again.

-Asks him lots of questions 'what are you drawing Zach?' open questions encourage him to talk and extend his sentences. 'We had some banana didn't we?' He can only respond yes or know so its limited his answer, however the mother only leaves a short pause after asking him this before she asks 'what else have we had?' this is a open question. She hasn't given him a lot of time to process the original question before asking the second one. This could also maybe because she realised it was a closed question and wanted him to speak more, or it could be because his body language in the video doesn't look like he is thinking to answer the first one so she’s asked him something else similar to keep him engaged and then encouraging to speak.

-Echoing 'Z: I think I don't H: nah I think you don't' could encourage him to maybe think about the fact he threw his food on the floor.

-Repair 'Z: Bolognay H: Bolognaise' She corrects him so hopefully he will eventually adapt his version of the noun to the correct pronunciation. 'Z: Frough H: Through' His muscles may have not developed to be able to make the sounds for 'through' as a result he has substituted his own sound however he may not be aware of this and thinks he is saying the adult version. As the mother echo's back to him the correct sound, over time he could develop the muscles and be able to say it how adults do.

-3rd person 'N: Mummy's dinner and Daddy's dinner' This could be so the child grown up knowing who is who, however as he gets older he may get confused with how to use certain pronouns like 'you' or 'they' but as parents as they get older they could start using 1st person to describe themselves and as a result the child could eventually, like the other language rules start to understand when to use it.

-Missing of the copula verb ‘I cutting round the edge’ missing out the auxiliary verb ‘am’ doesn’t mean the parents won’t understand what he’s saying.

-He asks his mum if its lasagne she has for tea. He wasn’t sure what her dinner was so gave it a noun he knows from his familiar topics, he overextends by categorising. 

-Zach confuses which noun is meant to be plural ‘so it’s a banana and it’s got skins’ this could be because once a banana is peeled it has many different parts. Or there could be more skins than bananas in his drawing. As a result the mother doesn’t repair his speech and just echo’s it back ‘are the skins off are they?’

-Zach uses a tag question ‘I can’t get it up der no?’ He’s encouraging some response, it sounds in the video like the mother and father are maybe settling down to eat as their food has been bought it which could be why he used to tag question to get their attention. Or he is genuinely confused and maybe questioning himself.

Everyone matters. - Every word is
important despite who said it.
Kate French 04/10/2014
Undoubtedly the work place will be filled with different ethnicities, cultures, ages, social classes and genders. So, it is understandable that there are many different languages and styles of speech. This article should guide you to a better understanding that different speech doesn't mean bad speech.

Different genders in the office.
If we looked overall at male and female's language, it is obvious that they use different approaches to language depending on who they are addressing. Woman are seen to be more co-operative and supportive towards one another, whereas men tend to use more derogative terms towards each other to emphasise they maintain a good relationship.
However it is more likely in the office to have mixed sex conversations. Studies have shown in mixed sex conversations there tends to be more confusion, however this does not mean the other persons point is less valid because you did not fully understand first time. To create the best working environment colleagues need to listen to each other and as a result will progress well as a team.