Common Core State Standards
« previous post | next post »
Sandra Wilde writes:
The National Governors' Association has just published a draft version of new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Sciences, which are open for public comment. I'm an education professor in the area of literacy with a special interest in grammar and related topics, and was wondering if you or other authors of Language Log would be interested in creating a post about them, since I know there have often been comments on the blog about published grammar advice for teachers. These standards are a big deal, since 48 states have agreed to adopt them. They're likely to have a big impact on curriculum for the foreseeable future.
SW suggests that LL readers may want to read the draft and submit comments, and that some discussion in LL posts and comments may be useful. According to the commoncore.org web site, "These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2".
I haven't had a chance to do more than skim the draft, but meanwhile, the comments section on this post is open.
Simon Cauchi said,
March 21, 2010 @ 10:23 am
Item 2a in the column for Grade I students on page 12 perpetuates a common misunderstanding about so-called "long" vowels which are better described as diphthongs:
"a. Aurally distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words
(e.g., /tap/ vs. /tape/, /sock/ vs. /soak/, /sit/ vs. /sight/)."
When I protest to Americans that the vowels in such words as "tape", "soak", and "sight" aren't long vowels at all, but diphthongs, they tell me that's what they were taught in Grade I.
Matthew Kehrt said,
March 21, 2010 @ 10:33 am
I think any document which contains the sentence "Apply the understanding that usage is a matter of convention, can change over time, and is sometimes contested" (p. 50) is not going to see too many complaints from Language Log!
@Simon Cauchi
I'm not sure why this is a problem. Are diphthongs not vowels? In my (possibly wrong) usage, both diphthongs and pure vowels are vowels.
Moreover, calling these vowels "long" and contrasting them with matched "short" vowels is pedagogically useful when teaching spelling. A long vowel and its equivalent short vowel are often spelled the same.
Lance said,
March 21, 2010 @ 10:44 am
There's actually a whole lot to like in there. For instance, at the 8th grade level:
Make effective language choices. Use verbs in the active and passive voice and in the conditional and subjunctive moods to achieve particular effects (e.g., emphasizing the actor or the action; expressing uncertainty or describing a state contrary to fact).
That's an educational standard that, as early as 8th grade, is specifically saying that passive voice isn't always wrong! Now, Geoff may object to the 7th grade version of effective language choices, which involves "express[ing] ideas concisely, eliminating wordiness and redundancy"; but as a pedagogical goal it's actually a great one (I remember how I wrote as a 7th grader), as long as it's applied reasonably and not in a blind Strunk-and-Whitean way.
Also, just below the passage that Matthew Kehrt quotes above (from page 50), it suggests that students "consult references (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage) as needed for guidance"; again, a fine suggestion.
I sympathize with Simon, above, about the fact that diphthongs are called "long vowels"–but it's a case where I'm willing to sacrifice technical accuracy for pedagogy. We can teach them the right way to think about them in college intro courses.
Jerry Friedman said,
March 21, 2010 @ 11:06 am
@Simon Cauchi:
Don't we actually tell that's what we were taught in first grade? Grade one is Canadian, as far as I know.
In countries where long A means the vowel in "far", do teachers tell six-year-olds a name for the vowel in "tape"?
John Lawler said,
March 21, 2010 @ 11:27 am
That would be short E.
But the short/long vowel controversy (which I agree with Simon is regrettable) should be just one more minor kink of English spelling, and evidence of the Great Vowel Shift for some, if they're also introduced in first grade to Kenyon & Knott, viz:
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
random_poster said,
March 21, 2010 @ 11:52 am
@Matthew Kehrt
A diphthong, strictly speaking, isn't a vowel, it's two distinct vowels pronounced adjacently where the first vowel transitions to the second with no intervening sounds. So in the example given, the diphthong in "tape" consists of two vowels, and is pronounced /teɪp/.
A diphthong differs from a long vowel in that, first, a long vowel is a vowel, and a single one at that. It differs from your run of the mill "normal" or short vowel in that it's pronounced longer. So the single vowel sound in "beet" is a long vowel because it's held longer than the vowel sound in the word "bet" (in IPA: /bi:t/ versus /bɛt/, the semicolon indicates the previous sound is held longer).
@Lance
Pedagogically, it seems that teaching the distinction between diphthongs and monophthongs at the first grade level would be a good thing, but I'll leave the debate over its goodness to the reading instruction experts. What seems more important is that the instructors be aware of this distinction, and even more importantly, the writers of the instruction manuals. I don't get the sense from reading these reading standards that they do, and if they don't, confusion is sure to continue.
random_poster said,
March 21, 2010 @ 11:56 am
Edit: replace "semicolon" w/ "colon" in above.
Matthew Kehrt said,
March 21, 2010 @ 12:36 pm
@random_poster I acknowledge that two different distinctions are being made here.
The first is is between pure vowels and diphthongs.
The second is between phonetically short and long vowels, which, depending on language, may or may not be phonemically distinguished.
I am making several points, which have been conflated in previous posts.
The first is that I was taught (and my formal training in linguistics is slim) that diphthongs are a class of vowels, which is distinct from monophthongs or "pure vowels". This is a terminological statement about technical linguistics, which I am totally unprepared to defend, and am willing to be corrected on.
The second is that, when teaching children, I am not sure that making a distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs is sensible. They generally fill the same roles in English words; it is rare (if ever?) that there is a context where one is allowed and the other is not. This class of phonemes is generally, in American education, called "vowels". This may or may not be different from the technical definition of vowels.
Thirdly, I realize that the educational use of the terms "long" and "short" are different from the technical uses. While "long" vowels in the educational sense are generally phonetically long in the technical sense (respectively "short"), I think that it is true that this difference is not phonemic in English, and so I am not sure teaching it to children is useful. Moreover, to claim that the educational definitions of "long" and "short" are "wrong" because they are not the same as the technical definition is fallacious.
Incidentally, it is my belief (and Wikipedia supports me, for what that's worth) that the educational terminology is holdover from the pre-Great Vowel Shift vowels, where the difference between long and short vowels was actual length.
Army1987 said,
March 21, 2010 @ 12:44 pm
Is the distinction between vowels and diphtongs really useful in English? It's not even 100% clearcut, e.g. there are people using a monophtong [E:] for SQUARE, and people using a diphtong [Ii] for FLEECE, and people for whom the same phoneme can be a diphtong or a monophtong depending on whether the syllable is open or closed, on how quickly they are speaking, etc. Isn't the distinction between checked and free vowels much more useful?
Alissa said,
March 21, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
Maybe there is some use in calling vowels 'long' and 'short' when teaching them, but I remember it making absolutely no sense to me. I couldn't figure out what was long or short about them. Because it made no sense, I could never remember which was supposed to be which. When I took intro to linguistics in college, I finally realized that it wasn't really supposed to make sense (at least in the sense that the difference isn't length). While there's nothing wrong with having the technical linguistic term be something different from what is taught in school, I thing there might be some benefit to teaching this topic in a way that is more logical. It would have helped me.
Army1987 said,
March 21, 2010 @ 12:51 pm
There are speakers for whom length is the only difference between, say, shed and shared, aren't there?
Simon Cauchi said,
March 21, 2010 @ 12:55 pm
@Jerry Friedman: Don't we actually tell that's what we were taught in first grade? Grade one is Canadian, as far as I know.
No doubt you're right. I copied "Grade I" from the table on page 12.
@Matthew Kehrt: Are diphthongs not vowels?
Diphthongs (as the word implies: di- twice, -phthong sound) are pairs of vowels sounded one after the other. Not at all the same thing as a long vowel, as random_poster explains.
But I agree with later comments that English has hardly any pure (= single) vowels. Indeed, I think "diphthongs" can be an understatement, especially where I live (New Zealand). How many vowel sounds are there in Kiwi-pronounced (or Cockney-pronounced) "now"? It can glide through the sequence [a], open o, closed o, [u]. Or something like that.
Bob Ladd said,
March 21, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
Whether you talk about "long" and "short" vowels or something else, it's important to say something about different structural classes of vowels to English-speaking schoolchildren who are acquiring some understanding of the written language. In particular, they need to know that there is a semi-systematic relation between the /ai/ and /I/ vowel phonemes represented by orthographic i (and similarly for the other vowel letters), and that there's fairly systematic use of single and double consonant letters in English orthography (pining / pinning, biter / bitter, etc. etc.) to mark which sound is indicated by the preceding vowel letter. "Diphthong", in this context, only confuses the issue, for reasons that Army1987 and others have already mentioned.
Coby Lubliner said,
March 21, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
The confusion seems to be over the fact that, in English, vowels is commonly used to mean the "vowel letters" AEIOU, that is, letters that in Middle English represented simple vowels, though I don't know why Y isn't included. This is why syzygy is sometimes called "a word without vowels." The distinction between "long vowels" and "short vowels" refers to the different sounds represented by the same vowel letter, and, yes, is a holdover from Middle English. Whether such a sound is a diphthong or a monophthong is secondary, and depends on dialect. The "long A" and "long O" are monophthongal [e:] and [o:], respectively, in the English of Scotland, Irealand, Wales, the West Indies and perhaps other places, and this is why most linguists, including those of LL, represent the corresponding phonemes as /e/ and /o/. The "long I" is monophthongal [æ:] in much of the Southern US.
Mark F. said,
March 21, 2010 @ 5:39 pm
It's just a fact about American usage that, in nontechnical contexts, the long vowels are the ones that are "pronounced like their names", basically [eI], [I], [aI], [oU] (maybe the o there should be a schwa), and [U] or [jU]. They're not all even diphthongs. It's really not a term for a class of vowels so much as a class of mapping between vowel letters and their sounds. I think it's way too deeply entrenched to call it an error.
American English has a pretty limited sense of true vowel length anyway, no?
Mark F said,
March 21, 2010 @ 6:36 pm
…I guess it could be a fact about usage outside the US too.
Sandra Wilde said,
March 21, 2010 @ 8:39 pm
Actually, the terminology of "long" and "short" vowels works reasonably well with kids. My greater concern with the standards is the teaching of so much formal terminology and focusing on items like subject/verb agreement when the children who don't use them "correctly" tend to be African Americans, English language learners, etc. Also, they make aspects of language acquisition into topics to be taught, such as explaining the meanings of compound words. These standards are very likely to be turned into worksheets by publishers.
Randy Alexander said,
March 21, 2010 @ 10:58 pm
Actually, the terminology of "long" and "short" vowels works reasonably well with kids.
It didn't work well with me. I always wondered why they were called that, and couldn't find an answer until at least college or grad school when I picked up a book on the history of English.
The terms did serve their function by allowing me to categorize the two kinds of vowels (tying into the orthographic system, as Bob Ladd points out above), but any two names could do that. Why not use names that don't mislead the students into imagining that vowel length is a distinguishing factor in English?
In my own ESL school in northeast China, where I designed the curriculum myself, I call /æ, ɛ, ɪ, a, ʌ (or more accurately ɐ)/ "basic sounds, since they are normally taught first, in simple two and three letter words. For /ei, i, ai, ou, (j)u/, I call them name sounds since their pronunciation matches the letter names.
Jerry Friedman said,
March 22, 2010 @ 12:36 am
@Simon Cauchi: If educational-standard committees are using "grade 1", it may filter to teachers and eventually to the general public. Possibly you've put LL ahead of the curve.
@Coby Lubliner: Lots of American children learn "A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y". According to Amazon, that's the title of two books (one of which looks very obscure), and Sometimes Y is the name of a band. I've heard the "syzygy" nonsense you mentioned, but I think and hope it's disappearing.
(I was taught that w is a vowel in many instances of aw, ew, and ow.)
ShadowFox said,
March 22, 2010 @ 1:37 am
OK, long/short vowel distinction advocates will have to explain something to me.
1) What's the difference between the vowels in
lit-lite, smock-smoke, tack-take, sock-soak, din-dine, bit-bite, pox-pokes, run-rune, stock-stoke, coke-cock, tap-tape, puss-puce
2) same question
far-fare-fear, car-care, cook-coke-cock, beet-bet-bit, beak-bike-beck, cat-cart-cared, bear-beer, tar-tare-tear, tier-tire, noose-news-nose, parse-pace-pass, pier-pear-pare-par, bird-bid-beer, born-burn
And one other thing–do you really think that decontextualized letters can represent phonemes? Would you really ask a first-grader what phonemes (or just sounds) "c" represents?
Final question–can we get back to discussing the standards rather than just rehashing one issue that someone brought up?
ShadowFox said,
March 22, 2010 @ 1:49 am
a few more: conquer-concur, crept-creeped-crypt, breed-bride-bread
yes, I know–sometimes it's the same "vowel", sometimes different. I am asking about phonetic differences here, not spelling. And, yes, stress is a characteristic–does stress have something to do with the distribution of vowels?
C Thornett said,
March 22, 2010 @ 2:38 am
The traditional long-short distinction doesn't account for the 'ah' sound of 'a' in 'father', but isn't that often called a 'broad' sound?
Nathan said,
March 22, 2010 @ 9:26 am
@C Thornett:
For a lot of Americans (including me), the a in father has the vowel traditionally called a "short o", as in sock. I know some varieties of English distinguish those as two phonemes, but a lot of us don't.
Mr Punch said,
March 22, 2010 @ 9:56 am
The issue of whether or not the terms "long" and "short" make sense, i.e., have any apparent connection to length, seems to me to be irrelevant to that of teaching a distinction between vowel sounds. (It's like my sister having trouble learning to tell time, in pre-digital days, because she couldn't tell which was the "big hand.") Long and short are taught as part of phonics; it's an important part of the stage of learning to read in which the student "sounds out" words.
I'm from Boston, and people here sometimes think I'm not because I pronounce (most of) my R's — but any expert can place me immediately because of the way I say my vowels. Vowel sounds are also the most obvious distinction between American, British, and Canadian English. There's no point in being flexible on usage if you're going to be prescritivist on pronunciation.
Sandra Wilde said,
March 22, 2010 @ 12:56 pm
The isolating phonemes is something that's particularly bugged me for years now, that people (particularly those involved in NCLB) have said kids need to learn to say /k/, /a/, and /t/ and put them together to say "cat." Obviously – but not to them – you can't say /k/ or /t/ in isolation so you end up trying to get /kat/ from /ku – a – tu/. The new standards repeat this error.
What makes sense to me with the vowels is to have a little instruction about how the spelling pattern CVC is associated with a particular set of vowels and the pattern CVCe or CVVC with another, working with word families. This is common enough to cover a lot of words and the rest they just pick up through reading.
A lot of us in education are trying to restore sanity to a climate that encourages teaching a huge amount of linguistic detail rather than just doing some teaching and recognizing the strong role of acquisition in becoming literate.
Jim F said,
March 22, 2010 @ 2:35 pm
While not an education expert by any means, I tend to agree with Sandra Wilde's last statement. English spelling and pronunciation seem far too irregular for anyone to become literate without a lot of reading exposure.
Julie said,
March 22, 2010 @ 6:18 pm
I think the main value to the long/short distinction is that it's what their parents know, and the children will learn better if their parents can help them.
I disagree that length is irrelevant, though. I have a slight hearing defect, and when I'm listening to non-native speakers, their too-short "long" vowels often lead me to misunderstand them. If I hear [wet], I might easily hear it as wet, rather than wait. If I hear [we:t], I will understand it immediately. I think most English speakers have considerable tolerance for vowel variance, and the length is another hint as to the intended meaning.
Mark F said,
March 23, 2010 @ 10:36 am
Actually, I'm curious — do people outside the US use the term "long vowel" for the "silent e" vowels? The OED doesn't seem to acknowledge that use, but Merriam-Webster does. And if not, is there a common term for the form of a vowel that you would hear in "m?te" as opposed to "m?t"?
Troy S. said,
March 23, 2010 @ 11:46 am
Isn't the distinction between long and short vowels a byproduct of Greek and Latin poetry scansion? There long vowels actually are twice as long as the short ones, though the reason they are long is often to simply fit the meter better. They can be long by nature (and diphthongs are naturally long) or by position (such as when followed by a double consonant.) It's an especially non-intuitive system since English doesn't have quantitative verse.
Bob said,
March 23, 2010 @ 1:42 pm
Maybe there is some use in calling vowels 'long' and 'short' when teaching them, but I remember it making absolutely no sense to me. I couldn't figure out what was long or short about them. Because it made no sense, I could never remember which was supposed to be which. When I took intro to linguistics in college, I finally realized that it wasn't really supposed to make sense (at least in the sense that the difference isn't length). While there's nothing wrong with having the technical linguistic term be something different from what is taught in school, I thing there might be some benefit to teaching this topic in a way that is more logical. It would have helped me. watch white collar online
Peter Taylor said,
March 23, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
Mark F wrote:
I can't speak for everyone outside the US, but my reaction to Bob Ladd's
was along the lines of "Why? I have no recollection of anyone teaching me anything about classes of vowels, and I think I speak, read, and write English fairly well." The terminology as people are using it here is completely new and fairly opaque to me, although I am familiar with long and short vowels in Latin.
FWIW I'm British, in my late 20s, and had a rather mixed-up primary education because my mother (a maths teacher) taught me to read and write when I was 3 and so I spent a term in year 1 before they bumped me up to year 3 (and then made me repeat years 3 and 6 to put me back with my age group).
Simon Cauchi said,
March 23, 2010 @ 4:26 pm
@Troy S.: "English doesn't have quantitative verse"
Not quite true. See, for example, Derek Attridge's Well-Weighed Syllables – Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres.
The most famous example of a poem in quantitative metre in English is probably Thomas Campion's much-anthologized piece in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, which begins:
Rose-cheekt Lawra, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties
Silent musick, either other
Sweetely gracing.
Which I scan as follows:
— — — – —
— — — – — – — –
— — — – — – — –
— – — –
(I take it that in the fourth line gr and ng are treated as single consonants.)
Greg Morrow said,
March 23, 2010 @ 7:15 pm
Troy S.: Anglo-Saxon distinguished between long and short vowels (in the classic length-of-sound phonetic sense). IIRC, the Great Vowel Shift operated in part on that length distinction. The American elementary pedagogical use of long and short is a relic of that history.
Sandra said,
March 24, 2010 @ 12:56 pm
I thought I'd try one more time to see if people have thoughts about the standards, though the discussion on long and short vowels has been interesting. :-) Here are two examples of the kind of teaching I think the standards will lead to.
1. The preposition song
http://www.misscantillon.com/Preposition%20Song.htm
2. Verb tenses for elementary kids
http://www.abcteach.com/free/g/grammar_simpleverbtenses.pdf
I'd also be happy to explain from an educator's perspective why these are so terrible, but would love to have some linguists' thoughts to back me up when I send formal comments to the Standards people.
Troy S. said,
March 26, 2010 @ 3:10 pm
The lesson on verb tenses doesn't seem terribly bad for an elementary school student. It wasn't until I studied foreign languages that I began to appreciate the relationships between morphology, syntax, and semantics, and the complexity of verb aspect as opposed to tense. Teaching semantics seems appropriate at that age. Of course, if you can manage to teach kids that English doesn't have a morphological future tense, but expresses the semantic concept through the use of a present tense auxiliary, that would be commendable. But maybe that wasn't why you found it terrible?
As for the preposition song, there does seem little value in memorizing lists of prepositions. It's more important to know what function they serve.
Julie said,
March 31, 2010 @ 5:26 pm
I'm not sure what purpose there is, at the elementary school level, in teaching tenses and prepositions. Assuming they're native speakers, they already know how to talk. If they learn to read well enough to actually enjoy reading, English grammar will be picked up naturally by exposure, in the same way that they learn to speak in different registers in different contexts.
Parts of speech and the like might be better dealt with by a basic course in a foreign language. (I don't remember learning much of anything in my fourth-grade grammar class, but I learned a lot of grammar in my seventh-grade Spanish class.)