Investigating literacy teachers'

linguistic knowledge

Dominik Lukes, Dyslexia Action

Daniel Gooch, IoE

Outline

Linguistic underpinnings of

literacy

Teacher knowledge

Phonics vs phonology

ILearnRW needs

“Why do teachers need to

know about the Structure of

Language?”

Townend and Walker, 2006

“those who were most

comfortable with the course

content were those who

already had some

knowledge of language

structure.”

“Good teachers should be

made uncomfortable by their

first encounter with the

social and structural

complexity of language.“

Lukes, 2010

Which reading skills

do you teach most

often?

“Syllable division”

“Vowels”

“Understanding unfamiliar words from context”

“Finding patterns in words”

“Dividing words into base and suffixes”

How do you teach

syllables?

“Wooden letters”

“Cards - physically move things

around”

“Highlight things with pens”

“Marking consonants and vowels in

the text”

“How many beats are there in that

word”

“Cumulative small steps building

on each other”

“Play games, particularly when a

child is starting to struggle/get

bored”

What’s missing?

Pronunciation dictionary

Phonics vs linguistics

Corpus

Dialect variation

Syllable division

knowledge

hospital

SWW

hospitable

WSWW

Phonics hos / pit / al hos / pit / a / ble

CEPD hos / pi / tal hos / pit / a / ble

LDP hosp / it / al ho / spit / ab / le

Onset maximization

before phonotatic

constraints

ho / spi / tal ho / spi / ta / ble

Phonic vs. phonological needs for

syllable division

Phonic vs. phonological needs for

syllable division

kitten

SW

spelling

SW

Phonics kit / ten spel / ling

CEPD kitt / en spell / ing

LDP kitt / en spell / ing

Onset maximization

before phonotatic

constraints

ki / tten spe / lling

MRC Psycholinguistic Database

Teacher knowledge of

syllable division does not

match linguistic analysis or

needs of machine readable

representation

How do you tell the game where the

boundary is?

How do you tell a reader which syllables

are open?

How do you analyze text and find

instances of < ay > = / eɪ / as in day, way

balloon

2 syllables: bal[short, closed] loon [long, closed]

adding rule

noun, verb

b & l oo n 5 phonemes, 7 letters

stress loon

possible misspellings: baloon, balun, balloonning

possible confusions:

inflectional forms: balloons [noun, verb], ballooning [verb, noun],

ballooned [verb]

derivational forms: balloonist

example sentences

ways of teaching difficulties

Pedagogic knowledge: relative position in a learning programme

Linguistic awareness: frequency (typicality) and relevance to

individual student

iLearnRW Internal Dictionary

Teacher decision tree

Conclusion

Much of teachers’

knowledge is implicit and

cannot be directly relied on

for expert advice outside the

classroom.

Teachers’ linguistic

knowledge has to be

represented through proxies

and interaction patterns

rather than algorithmically.

Teachers and non-teachers

would benefit from tools that

would support their access

to the analysis of language.