Language Awareness of Teacher Trainees

Knowledge of language is the basis of every teacher’s daily work. After completing their training, teacher trainees will utilize their knowledge of language as both the basis and the setting for their future educational decisions regarding reading, writing, and language communication. Insights into the importance of language in teaching indicate that teaching language knowledge should occupy a prominent position in teacher-training programs. Accordingly, courses in applied linguistics have been added to courses on academic writing and constitute an essential part of teacher-training programs throughout the world. However, despite the acknowledged importance of language classes in teacher training, there is little systematic research into the changes that occur in teacher trainees’ language knowledge following completion of these courses in applied linguistics. This study investigates the change in teachers’ phonological and morphological awareness in Hebrew following their participation in a course entitled "Language Sound and Form". In a test conducted at the beginning and end of each year, teacher trainees were asked to choose the correct morpho-phonemic structure out of two or three options. The words were inserted into sentences consisting of pseudo-words and real words. Significant improvements were found between students’ skills at the beginning of the academic year and its end, indicating that participation in the course apparently helped augment teacher trainees’ linguistic knowledge. Furthermore, this improvement was shown to enable the application of this knowledge to new forms. These findings form the basis of a discussion about the importance of linguistic knowledge in teachers’ training

Dyslexia Impairs Speech Recognition but Can Spare Phonological Competence

Dyslexia is associated with numerous deficits to speech processing. Accordingly, a large literature asserts that dyslexics manifest a phonological deficit. Few studies, however, have assessed the phonological grammar of dyslexics, and none has distinguished a phonological deficit from a phonetic impairment. Here, we show that these two sources can be dissociated. Three experiments demonstrate that a group of adult dyslexics studied here is impaired in phonetic discrimination (e.g., ba vs. pa), and their deficit compromises even the basic ability to identify acoustic stimuli as human speech. Remarkably, the ability of these individuals to generalize grammatical phonological rules is intact. Like typical readers, these Hebrew-speaking dyslexics identified ill-formed AAB stems (e.g., titug) as less wordlike than well-formed ABB controls (e.g., gitut), and both groups automatically extended this rule to nonspeech stimuli, irrespective of reading ability. The contrast between the phonetic and phonological capacities of these individuals demonstrates that the algebraic engine that generates phonological patterns is distinct from the phonetic interface that implements them. While dyslexia compromises the phonetic system, certain core aspects of the phonological grammar can be spared

Speech-nonspeech discrimination.

<p>(A) Discrimination (d′) by dyslexics and skilled readers (controls). (B) The sensitivity of dyslexics and controls to the phonological structure of Hebrew stems in a speech discrimination task (Error bars are confidence intervals for the difference between the means).</p

Phonetic identification of consonants and vowels by skilled readers and dyslexics along a 10-step continuum.

<p>Step continuum denotes the target stimulus. Error bars reflect confidence intervals for the difference between the group means.</p

Spectrograms of a natural speech stimulus <i>zizul</i> (A) and its nonspeech counterpart (B).

<p>Spectrograms of a natural speech stimulus <i>zizul</i> (A) and its nonspeech counterpart (B).</p

Accuracy (proportion errors) of skilled and dyslexic participants in word/nonword discrimination (Experiment 1).

<p>Accuracy (proportion errors) of skilled and dyslexic participants in word/nonword discrimination (Experiment 1).</p

Phonetic discrimination of consonants and vowels by skilled readers and dyslexics along a 10-step continuum.

<p>Step continuum denotes the midpoint between the two stimuli (A and B) presented for discrimination. Error bars reflect confidence intervals for the difference between the group means.</p

Word/nonword discrimination. (

<p>A) Discrimination (d′) by dyslexics and skilled readers (controls). (B) The sensitivity of dyslexics and controls to the phonological structure of Hebrew stems in the discrimination of auditory nonwords from words (Error bars are confidence intervals for the difference between the means).</p

Reading scores of dyslexic and control participants in Experiments 1–3.

<p>Reading scores of dyslexic and control participants in Experiments 1–3.</p