Hey, quick question.

[conuly]

Ana learned at school that the vowels are A E I O U. Which they are, no arguments from me :)

When she asked later about vowels, rather than just repeat the list I told her that a vowel is basically a sound you can make with your mouth totally open, not even your tongue closing it up.

That worked really well - she immediately tested several sounds and worked out without any help if they were vowels or not. (Yay her!)

But is there some sort of pedagogical reason that the division of letters into vowels and consonants is presented as arbitrary lists instead of simple rules? Like, was I wrong to state it that way?

On a similar note, Evangeline, like many small children, gets the fidgets when she's very tired, and really needs some gentle holding down to fall asleep at naptime. She's not like Ana. She doesn't scream, kick, or - thank god - headbutt, but she *is* pretty creative at these staying awake tactics. Like she breathes funny, making Darth Vader breaths (I know it's intentional on some level because she stops when told to). Or she whispers - mostly babbling, weirdly. The more she fidgets, the tireder she proves to be, and the longer (and sounder) she sleeps when she finally passes out.

So today, at naptime, she was going very quietly yayayayaya and I told her she had to be *quiet*, with a *still mouth*. So she started going ʔʔʔʔʔʔʔ instead. Yes, that's correct - I told her to stop making noises and moving around so she could go to sleep, and she responded with a string of glottal stops. (I told her that she still had to knock it off.)

Of course, it's not like this is a strange sound foreign to the English language, but it still seemed odd to hear her just produce a string of them out of the ether.

Comments

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Probably it's assumed that it's easier to teach a kid -- or an adult learning the language -- to remember five letters that are vowels and class all other letters as not vowels than to teach her to sort out the differences between the sounds so that she can categorize them on her own. But Ana can work it out, so I assume other kids can, too, and ...

Basically, I don't know.

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

So she started going ʔʔʔʔʔʔʔ instead

*cracks up* That's awesome. I mean, bad and wrong, but awesome. *G*

And the definition you gave is more or less accurate. Linguistically speaking, vowel sounds are ones that have minimal impedance through the vocal tract (the shape of the mouth varies -- "ah" is different from "ee" -- but there are no blockages), whereas consonants have partial or complete closure. (sustainable sounds, like f and z and l, are partial; non-sustainable, like t and k and p, are complete.)

There *is* the slight complication of alphabets being not 1:1 with sounds in the language, hence w and y being sort of semivowels ("y" functions as a consonant in "yellow" but as a vowel in "happy"), but that's ... more complicated than most non-linguistics *undergrads* want to get into *G*

</linguistic dorkery>

[conuly]

Yeah, I know my answer to her was linguistically correct. I'm just wondering why it wasn't presented to her that way in the first place!

[conuly]

It's assumed wrongly.

It's like giving kids a list of words to memorize and told they're "prepositions" instead of telling them what prepositions do. The second method may take more active brainpower, but it's a heck of a lot easier in the long run.

Or, it's like relying on an increasingly complex system of pictograms instead of developing any form of alphabet (or syllabry or whatnot). Sure, it's more abstract - but once you get beyond concepts like "this is poison" and "a nice lady lives at this house" pictograms aren't gonna cut it anymore.

[conuly]

That reply was unnecessarily brusque, excuse me.

And yes, it was adorably cute - and VERY WRONG - what she did.

BTW, that whole thing with W irks me. I keep wanting to post about how Evangeline turns N after O into owm - where you can here the "w" in there - but if I write that it sounds like she's saying ow-m, or maybe just "own with an m" and not indicating that she puts an actual, you know, w in there.

And I can't type in IPA. I copy pasted the glottal stop letter.

[conuly]

I'm not frustrated at you, of course.

[tenou-k.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the reason that teachers avoid explaining consonants as sounds that involve an obstruction of air flow is to keep kids from asking why "Ppppbbbth" isn't a letter.

[gingembre.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is because the teachers themselves are not really taught about the whys and wherefores of vowel and consonant categories. And, if they do know, feel it may be "over the kids head" perhaps? Although I always think that is dumb - I find WITHOUT FAIL that it is much easier to remember something when I know HOW/WHY it works versus an arbitrary memorization. And, if you forget, chances are good you still know the HOW so you can work it out if you need to!

In the end to me, it is all about empowerment.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I suspect that children are taught an arbitrary list because "that's how it's always been done". I wonder whether most teachers are even aware of the existence of simple rules, or whether they just take the division for granted or think a list is easier to memorise.

I don't think you were wrong for explaining the rule to Ana; on the contrary. If she understood it, as she apparently did, why should it be wrong?

[birdpooka.livejournal.com]

Er, drive-by posting from a random stranger, but, one reason might be that, while the generalization holds fairly well, there are also sounds like American/British English "r" or "w" that also fit, at least for some speakers. So, mostly, the definition of a vowel is messy.

[conuly]

R and W are, in fact, semivowels :) (They're also approximants, but that would not have been such a snappy answer!)

The definition of a vowel is actually pretty clean, it's just that my explanation of the definition for a five year old isn't perfect because, well, she's still five and doesn't have the vocabulary.

[conuly]

You know ozarque taught French once? She got chewed out for teaching the students a few simple sound changes to totally regularize those irregular verbs. No, apparently she was supposed to give them impossible lists to memorize. Oy.

[conuly]

Because it's not a phoneme. Duh! (As to why it's not a phoneme, I don't know. Clearly, we must get on this right away and remedy that tragic situation!)

[conuly]

Oh, they probably never thought about it, but that doesn't make any sense.

First, if they haven't ever thought about it, and never thinking about it is okay in our culture, why do we even bother teaching them which letters represent vowels and which don't? What does it even matter? And second, how could they never think of it? I worked out what vowel meant when I was in the first or second grade.

[birdpooka.livejournal.com]

Ah, quite true. I've just gotten really used to looking at this stuff in spectrograms so I tend to think more in terms of sonorants and obstruents anyway. Is awesome that you're teaching this stuff to five year old without assuming it's too hard. Syllabic and non-syllabic shouldn't be too hard though, as long as she's got the idea of syllables?
I really lucked out in school when they were teaching us this stuff so, we got a e i o u and sometimes y, but the teacher was also very good about teaching us how things were actually pronounced and didn't really bother too much with the list once we'd gone over it. Unfortunately, while it would be cool if people actually taught phonetics, I've bored enough people at parties in two languages (and speakers of a third but using English since my Mandarin sucks) to figure out that not knowing/caring about one's native language is pretty common in a lot of places.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Don't ask me, I'm with you on this.

To be fair we were taught what vowel means in school (although we were also given the list, just in case, but there were enough other things.

Especially with English, where A,I,E,O and U can represent so many different sounds, it would be way better to just teach the kids the basic rule. It's not even a difficult one, after all.

(The evil little anthropologist in me wants to say that probably the teaching of lists for memorising is very old, and comes from times when only a select few were allowed or could afford to think independently and look into backgrounds and mechanisms, and the majority got handed knowledge in memorisable little lists without ever being explained how and why those lists were made in the first place. Knowledge is, after all, power...)

[conuly]

Your evil little anthropologist is quite a cynic.

Incidentally, it's better to teach them the rule instead of a list. Otherwise you get children who think "unicorn" starts with a vowel because, well, "U-is-a-vowel". Which is right, but not at all correct unless you say oonicorn instead of the standard yunicorn pronunciation.

[conuly]

Empowerment, that's the word.

[norinel.livejournal.com]

I've taken an introductory-level college linguistics course and didn't get a definition of a vowel- we memorized the vowels as a list of phonemes.

[conuly]

Wait... they didn't explain the various different categories of phonemes?

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Probably it's assumed that it's easier to teach a kid -- or an adult learning the language -- to remember five letters that are vowels and class all other letters as not vowels than to teach her to sort out the differences between the sounds so that she can categorize them on her own. But Ana can work it out, so I assume other kids can, too, and ...

Basically, I don't know.

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

So she started going ʔʔʔʔʔʔʔ instead

*cracks up* That's awesome. I mean, bad and wrong, but awesome. *G*

And the definition you gave is more or less accurate. Linguistically speaking, vowel sounds are ones that have minimal impedance through the vocal tract (the shape of the mouth varies -- "ah" is different from "ee" -- but there are no blockages), whereas consonants have partial or complete closure. (sustainable sounds, like f and z and l, are partial; non-sustainable, like t and k and p, are complete.)

There *is* the slight complication of alphabets being not 1:1 with sounds in the language, hence w and y being sort of semivowels ("y" functions as a consonant in "yellow" but as a vowel in "happy"), but that's ... more complicated than most non-linguistics *undergrads* want to get into *G*

</linguistic dorkery>

[conuly]

Yeah, I know my answer to her was linguistically correct. I'm just wondering why it wasn't presented to her that way in the first place!

[conuly]

It's assumed wrongly.

It's like giving kids a list of words to memorize and told they're "prepositions" instead of telling them what prepositions do. The second method may take more active brainpower, but it's a heck of a lot easier in the long run.

Or, it's like relying on an increasingly complex system of pictograms instead of developing any form of alphabet (or syllabry or whatnot). Sure, it's more abstract - but once you get beyond concepts like "this is poison" and "a nice lady lives at this house" pictograms aren't gonna cut it anymore.

[conuly]

That reply was unnecessarily brusque, excuse me.

And yes, it was adorably cute - and VERY WRONG - what she did.

BTW, that whole thing with W irks me. I keep wanting to post about how Evangeline turns N after O into owm - where you can here the "w" in there - but if I write that it sounds like she's saying ow-m, or maybe just "own with an m" and not indicating that she puts an actual, you know, w in there.

And I can't type in IPA. I copy pasted the glottal stop letter.

[conuly]

I'm not frustrated at you, of course.

[tenou-k.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the reason that teachers avoid explaining consonants as sounds that involve an obstruction of air flow is to keep kids from asking why "Ppppbbbth" isn't a letter.

[gingembre.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is because the teachers themselves are not really taught about the whys and wherefores of vowel and consonant categories. And, if they do know, feel it may be "over the kids head" perhaps? Although I always think that is dumb - I find WITHOUT FAIL that it is much easier to remember something when I know HOW/WHY it works versus an arbitrary memorization. And, if you forget, chances are good you still know the HOW so you can work it out if you need to!

In the end to me, it is all about empowerment.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I suspect that children are taught an arbitrary list because "that's how it's always been done". I wonder whether most teachers are even aware of the existence of simple rules, or whether they just take the division for granted or think a list is easier to memorise.

I don't think you were wrong for explaining the rule to Ana; on the contrary. If she understood it, as she apparently did, why should it be wrong?

[birdpooka.livejournal.com]

Er, drive-by posting from a random stranger, but, one reason might be that, while the generalization holds fairly well, there are also sounds like American/British English "r" or "w" that also fit, at least for some speakers. So, mostly, the definition of a vowel is messy.

[conuly]

R and W are, in fact, semivowels :) (They're also approximants, but that would not have been such a snappy answer!)

The definition of a vowel is actually pretty clean, it's just that my explanation of the definition for a five year old isn't perfect because, well, she's still five and doesn't have the vocabulary.

[conuly]

You know ozarque taught French once? She got chewed out for teaching the students a few simple sound changes to totally regularize those irregular verbs. No, apparently she was supposed to give them impossible lists to memorize. Oy.

[conuly]

Because it's not a phoneme. Duh! (As to why it's not a phoneme, I don't know. Clearly, we must get on this right away and remedy that tragic situation!)

[conuly]

Oh, they probably never thought about it, but that doesn't make any sense.

First, if they haven't ever thought about it, and never thinking about it is okay in our culture, why do we even bother teaching them which letters represent vowels and which don't? What does it even matter? And second, how could they never think of it? I worked out what vowel meant when I was in the first or second grade.

[birdpooka.livejournal.com]

Ah, quite true. I've just gotten really used to looking at this stuff in spectrograms so I tend to think more in terms of sonorants and obstruents anyway. Is awesome that you're teaching this stuff to five year old without assuming it's too hard. Syllabic and non-syllabic shouldn't be too hard though, as long as she's got the idea of syllables?
I really lucked out in school when they were teaching us this stuff so, we got a e i o u and sometimes y, but the teacher was also very good about teaching us how things were actually pronounced and didn't really bother too much with the list once we'd gone over it. Unfortunately, while it would be cool if people actually taught phonetics, I've bored enough people at parties in two languages (and speakers of a third but using English since my Mandarin sucks) to figure out that not knowing/caring about one's native language is pretty common in a lot of places.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Don't ask me, I'm with you on this.

To be fair we were taught what vowel means in school (although we were also given the list, just in case, but there were enough other things.

Especially with English, where A,I,E,O and U can represent so many different sounds, it would be way better to just teach the kids the basic rule. It's not even a difficult one, after all.

(The evil little anthropologist in me wants to say that probably the teaching of lists for memorising is very old, and comes from times when only a select few were allowed or could afford to think independently and look into backgrounds and mechanisms, and the majority got handed knowledge in memorisable little lists without ever being explained how and why those lists were made in the first place. Knowledge is, after all, power...)

[conuly]

Your evil little anthropologist is quite a cynic.

Incidentally, it's better to teach them the rule instead of a list. Otherwise you get children who think "unicorn" starts with a vowel because, well, "U-is-a-vowel". Which is right, but not at all correct unless you say oonicorn instead of the standard yunicorn pronunciation.

[conuly]

Empowerment, that's the word.

[norinel.livejournal.com]

I've taken an introductory-level college linguistics course and didn't get a definition of a vowel- we memorized the vowels as a list of phonemes.

[conuly]

Wait... they didn't explain the various different categories of phonemes?