Pronouncing "zoonoses"

I see Google Master has a question about students pronouncing "zoonoses" -- I still cannot, to this day, remember how to pronounce zoonoses ... and I'm pretty sure I've been pronouncing it wrong since the day I first encountered the word in Arthur Whimbey's book.

Plus now, on top of that, I have no idea how to pronounce "zoonotic."

The most recent pronunciation look-up I've done for "zoonoses" tells me to pronounce it ZOH-noh-sus (sort of like Jonas's except with a Z), but I can't bring myself to pronounce "zoonotic" ZOH-nah-tick.

How is "zoonotic" pronounced, anyway?

Polar vortex la-la-la

Every few months I'll learn some horrible new thing I have never heard of in my entire life, which at this point is starting to seem weird, and a little bit creepy. Are there a lot of horrible things I don't know about? Not obscure horrible things--I'd just as soon not know about those--but regular horrible things, the kind of horrible things you can find on Wikipedia?

Things like Miller Fisher Syndrome, for instance. Until 2013 I had not heard even the words "Miller Fisher Syndrome." Then one Wednesday my next-door neighbor and friend started coming down with a cold and by Friday she was completely paralyzed.

Paralyzed.

I had spent years avoiding spinal cord injuries by not riding a lot of horses or bicycles, and come to find out all it takes to end up helpless and hallucinating in the ICU is catching the wrong kind of cold.

(My neighbor is fine now, thank God. She recovered quickly, too, much more quickly than I expected after a couple of sessions with Google.)

Anyway, Miller Fisher Syndrome. A new one on me.

Then yesterday I read the news and found….polar vortex.

I grew up a a farm, for pete's sake. My dad's crops lived or died by the weather. I thought I knew every catastrophic, life-altering storm and/or temperature change on the menu; in fact, I was confident I did. Yet somehow, in all these years, the words "polar vortex" never came up.

What next?

when things changed (vocabulary edition)

in the Wall Street Journal:

In the late 1970s I taught English grammar and literature in the 7th grade. I used the same literature book that my two daughters had used when they were students in the school only two years before. It included portions of books, single stories and poems written by authors including Carl Sandburg, Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway and Anne Frank. The themes were real life—loneliness, poverty, joy, broken homes, shame, pity. The first paragraph from one story included the words infatuated, distraction, periodicals and metaphorically speaking.

The next year the school was integrated with students bused in from downtown Columbus. These literature books were put in storage and replaced with short-story books about animals with human characteristics. Animals were used so that there were no blatant stereotypes of human beings, no hint of direct bias toward a group or idea.

I retrieved the former books, so sorry was I that these students could not also get lost in their incredible prose. But it was to no avail—so many words were unfamiliar to the students that there was no meaning to the sentences. OK, I tried reading the stories to the class. That lasted about a week. A whole class time could easily be used in delving into the background of one word to get the meaning.

And we wonder why students suffer from vocabulary inequality?

Lois Moor
Columbus, Ohio

Remember this?

Back in 1977, having watched SAT scores fall for 15 years, the College Board, which developed and administers the SAT, engaged a panel to try to identify the underlying causes of the decline. A first hypothesis to be checked was whether the test had somehow become more demanding. But, no, to the contrary, indications were that scoring had become more lenient. A second prominent hypothesis was that the decline was due to changes in the demographics of the test takers. Analyses shows this hypothesis to be largely correct, but only for a brief while. Over the early 1960s, changes in the composition of the tested population accounted for as much as three-quarters of the test score decline—and, no wonder, for during this period the number of students taking the SAT tripled. Over the 1970s, however, though the test-taking population stabilized, the scores did not. Instead, the decline continued, even steeper than before, while the extent to which it could be ascribed to demographic shifts shrank to 30 percent at most. Furthermore, the scores that dropped most were those of the strongest students, the students in the top 10 percent of their class; the scores of students toward the bottom of the distribution held steady or even increased.

Advancing Our Students' Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts
by Marilyn Jager Adams
American Educator | Winter 2010 - 2011

AND SEE:
stop the multiverse, I want to get off

Terri W on vocabulary in Master Reynard

Terri W wrote:

I'm currently reading Jane Fielding's Master Reynard: The History of a Fox to my kids as our night-time book, it's an elementary read-aloud from about 100 years ago ... and on many pages, there's at least one word I've never even *heard* before, let alone know the definition off the top of my head.

(Admittedly, it's generally the nature-related stuff like "furze" and "sett," but still...)

And the sentences!

"The glimpse I got of the face of the precipice showed that the ivy had lost all its leaves, the bared stems standing out plainly against the black fissures that seamed the great wall of rock besprinkled with sparks which in their fall resembled shooting stars."

Or this gem:

"Of course, had the matter of digging by day, in which lay the sting of the underground annoyance, been brought to an issue, we foxes had not a shadow of right on our side; because we knew that the earth belonged to the badger by right of excavation, and that we were there on sufferance only as long as he found us tolerant and agreeable."

None of our modern day early elementary readers have that kind of complexity. And the ones I quote above were not ferreted out for their uniqueness -- I just opened to random pages -- the whole book is like that.

My 4 year old was a little wiggly the first few nights, but now he's used to it and is able to follow the story.

Crimson Wife on vocabulary in older books

Ever since our county library system's big book giveaway last September, I've made it a priority to borrow the older titles on my "to-read" list before they are removed from circulation. So most of the books I've read in recent months were published in the late '80's or early '90's. I've been surprised at how much richer the vocabulary is compared to recently-published books aimed at a similar audience. I've found the need to keep a dictionary handy while reading because I keep encountering unfamiliar words.

Absolutely.

Vocab in books published prior to the 80s is much larger and more varied.

And: lots of the SAT Critical Reading passages are drawn from books published prior to the 70s.

A couple of years ago, I bought a copy of Penrod for C and was astounded at the difficulty of the vocabulary. I loved the book as a child, and I doubt many children today could read it.

cyberspace jabberama

Just found this phrase - cyberspace jabberama - in a Boris Johnson column.

Love it!

I put it right up there with codswallop, a word I learned from a book on British slang that I bought last year. I recommend it:

teach your babies to spell, part 2: spelling a word helps you learn its meaning

Teaching children how to spell new vocabulary words helps them learn the meaning of the word:

In summary, the results of both experiments yield several important findings. Elementary school students learned and remembered the pronunciations and meanings of new vocabulary words better when they were exposed to written forms of the words during study periods than when they only heard and repeated the words.

note: Fluenz is based on this principle. Using Fluenz, you never hear a word without also seeing -- and practicing -- how to spell and type it.


good readers versus poor readers

Higher level readers outperformed lower level readers, and the advantage provided by seeing written words over not seeing written words was much greater among higher readers than among lower readers.

Bear this in mind: strong readers learn from print.

The present findings show the importance of students’ acquisition of strong orthographic knowledge to benefit vocabulary learning. Fifth graders with better orthographic knowledge outperformed those with weaker knowledge on the training measures as well as on the posttests. Most impressive were the increasingly large gains over trials that higher level readers made when the pronunciations of words were learned with spellings compared to the gains made with no spellings and compared to the gains made by lower level readers (see Figure 2). The fact that higher level readers showed a much steeper slope in learning the pronunciations of words with spelling aids than lower level readers suggests a Matthew effect (Stanovich, 1986), with the rich getting richer in expressive vocabulary during the course of learning as a result of superior orthographic knowledge.

If you are lucky enough to have a child who is a strong reader, this may be a problem because attention to the written word appears to be ebbing in public schools. Here in my own district, $25K per pupil funding, posters reign supreme. Posters in Spanish, posters in math, posters in Honors English at the high school. So many posters! The "kick-off" for the new Strategic Plan, which includes environmental stewardship as a character ed goal, is -- you guessed it -- a call for posters. About the environment.

So few books are assigned that the PTSA has filed an official proposal with the administration and school board asking that district schools require students to read good books and plenty of them. The administration responded at once with a plan to have the AP Photography class take staged photographs of teachers reading books, which will be posted throughout the halls of the high school. Some photos will be "authentic," meaning teachers will be captured reading books they are actually reading in real life; others will have a humorous slant, which apparently means they'll be reading books they aren't reading in real life. (Shakespeare? The Bible? The telephone directory?)

Parents are going to have to put together their own afterschool reading programs, I fear.


the NCTM on 21st century literacy

In the 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association established national standards for English language arts learners that anticipated the more sophisticated literacy skills and abilities required for full participation in a global, 21st century community. The selected standards, listed in the appendix, served as a clarion call for changes underway today in literacy education.

Today, the NCTE definition of 21st century literacies makes it clear that further evolution of curriculum, assessment, and teaching practice itself is necessary.

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The Definition of 21st Century Literacies

These are the people calling the shots.


a comment from a reviewer of Rosenthal's & Ehri's study:

The research conducted in this study makes a significant contribution to reading theory and practice in that it ties together the orthographic/phonological system with the meaning system in ways not previously thought. The researchers show quite clearly that students who see the spellings of words actually learn the meanings of the words more easily. This is quite a remarkable finding. I know of no research on vocabulary learning or vocabulary instruction that rests on such a claim. The emphasis in the vocabulary literature is on learning the meanings of words, not on the value of seeing the words and tying together knowledge from the different systems. Because of this connection, the research makes a significant contribution to reading theory and also has specific and practical application to everyday practice in a way that few research studies do.

The Mnemonic Value of Orthography for Vocabulary Learning
Julie Rosenthal and Linnea C. Ehri
Journal of Educational Psychology
2008, Vol. 100, No. 1, 175–191

Concepts First, then Accurate Vocabulary: Better Student Learning

A news release from Stanford describing Bryan Brown and Kihyun Ryoo's research:

To talk about photosynthesis, you need to know a little Latin, a bit of French, some Greek, a word coined by a pair of French chemists in the 19th century, and a word of ancient origin that has been adopted and adapted by scientists around the world.

There's photosynthesis—New Latin. And glucose—a French modification of a Greek word. There's chlorophyll—coined by French scientists Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. And chloroplast—part of the so-called International Scientific Vocabulary.

Those words are just part of the scientific vocabulary teachers will soon be writing on whiteboards in fifth-grade classrooms across the country to explain the process by which green plants convert water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into carbohydrates and oxygen.

Usually, elementary school students are expected to learn the concepts and lexicon of photosynthesis—and other scientific subjects—simultaneously.

But according to a recent study by Bryan Brown, an assistant professor of education at Stanford, and Kihyun Ryoo, a doctoral candidate in Stanford's School of Education, students who learned the basic concepts of photosynthesis in "everyday English" before learning the scientific terms for the phenomenon fared much better on tests than students taught the traditional way.

Brown and Ryoo, who published the results of the study in the April 8 online issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, called their method the "content-first" approach.

Go read the whole release, and Link to original article, Teaching science as a language: A content-first approach to science teaching

free rice

Susan S just sent this link, saying the site is addictive.

It is.

It's way addictive.

vocabulary word for the day

thenar eminence



I'm reading Ian Osborn's Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals, which I think Karen told me about.

In med school Osborn suffered from an obsession involving his thenar eminence:

I would have the sudden, intrusive image of me standing at a patient's bedside ready to draw a sample of blood: I unsheath a large-bore phlebotomy needle, menacing, daggerlike in its appearance, and then inexplicably, instead of inserting the needle into my patient's vein, I thrust it to the hilt into the thenar eminence of my hand.

omg

back to work