Test Bank Answers Language in the School Years Ch.10 Hoff

Teaching Resources for Chapter 10

Links

• [intermediate] For a quick overview on various aspects of morphology, check out these wonderful course guides from Professor Pat Kamalani Hurley at the University of Hawai’I (Leeward Community College). After you read about the Linguistics of morphology, be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the pages for links to some lighter activities.

Morphology in general:

http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod4-1_morphology/4mod4.1.2_morphemes.htm

Inflectional morphology: http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod4-1_morphology/4mod4.1.4_inflectional.htm

Derivational morphology: http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod4-1_morphology/4mod4.1.3_derivational.htm

• [basic] To learn more about Phonological awareness, and to see many activities that foster it, check out this website: http://phonologicalawareness.org/

• [basic] To learn more about Dyslexia and get advice for parents, educators, policy makers and tips for people with Dyslexia, check out this website from Yale University on Dyslexia and creativity. In the “Have Dyslexia?” drop down menu, you can read about the personal experiences of people with Dyslexia and share your own story.

http://dyslexia.yale.edu/

• [intermediate] There are lots of popular articles available discussing the “Reading Wars”. Here are a few to help orient you in the debate:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/read.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/end-of-the-reading-wars-498865/

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/Reading_Wars.html

Activities for Students

• Many of the developments in language ability over the school years involve aspects of meta-linguistic understanding. A great way to get a feel for what this involves is to look at children’s humor: many jokes involve shifting perspectives on language. To see lots of good examples, check out this page of children’s jokes: http://www.kidsjokes.co.uk/index.html (Note – there are ads at the top of each page; scroll down to get to the jokes. Different kinds of joke categories are listed on the left hand side.)

Pick out 5 (or more!) jokes and explain what kind of advanced language skills are necessary to “get” the joke. When would you expect children to find these jokes funny?

• Talk to an elementary school teacher – or, to a student taking a course on elementary education – and ask them about their opinion of the Whole Language vs. Phonics approaches to teaching children how to read. Why do they believe in the approach that they do? To what extent do you find their opinions well supported by evidence?

• Examine the development of children’s ability to tell stories. In the CHILDES database, there are many transcripts of children telling the frog stories: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/browser/index.php?url=Frogs/

In the menu on the left, you will see languages and researcher names – click on a name to see a list of transcripts; click on a transcript name to see the child’s story appear in the right hand screen. Examine the stories of 3 children of different ages and identify which narrative elements they include – for example, do they provide setting information? Do they refer to mental states of the characters? Do they provide clear descriptions of obstacles and goals? Do they provide a moral or a wrap-up of the story?

Describe the stories of the children and discuss how they change as children develop through the school years.

Online Movies

Movies on CD

Quicktime Movies

Sample Test Questions

1. When children first enter school:
   1. their language skills are very under-developed and incomplete in all domains.
   2. their oral language skills are largely in place.
   3. they can typically already read text fluently.
   4. their syntactic understanding is strong, but their phonological skills are weak.
2. Studies of children’s accents indicate that:
   1. after the age of five, children do not change their accents, regardless of input.
   2. children typically change their accents several times throughout their development.
   3. adolescents change accents, but only in response to moving to new geographical regions.
   4. peer influences can cause children to change or acquire new accents.
3. Factors which contribute to lexical development in children after over the school years include:
   1. children’s increasing ability to use quick, incidental learning.
   2. children’s increasing ability to make use of direct instruction of word meanings.
   3. children’s increasing knowledge of word formation processes an morphological organization.
   4. all of the above are factors that aid in school aged children’s ability to increase their lexicon.
4. Consider the morpheme –ist, which means a person who performs an action: an illusionist is someone who performs illusions and a typist is someone who types. What kind of morpheme is this and why?
   1. It is an inflectional morpheme because it doesn’t change the topic of the word: both typing and a typist are part of the same activity.
   2. It is derivational morpheme because it changes the kind (the syntactic category) of word it is on: type is a verb but typist is a noun.
   3. It is a compounding morpheme because it adds meaning to the original word: typist provides more information than typing.
   4. None of these answers are correct descriptions of that kind of morpheme.
5. The ability to use word formation processes such as noun compounding in new and creative situations:
   1. develops over the school years and is subject to individual differences so that so that even some adults are better at it than others.
   2. develops over the school years but all typically developing adults eventually reach the same level of ability.
   3. is fully developed by the time enter the school age years, although children do increase their speed at creating compounds.
   4. requires extensive schooling in order for adults to become even moderately capable with it.
6. Studies of conversational style in school age and teenage children have found that these children are:
   1. largely egocentric and able to talk only about themselves.
   2. highly dependent on scaffolding from peers and parents to produce coherent discourses
   3. able to maintain topics and be responsive to their conversational partner.
   4. still developing their basic syntactic abilities, as can be seen in their developing conversational abilities.
7. Which of the following is true about gender differences in language use over the school age period?
   1. boys are more likely to ask questions while girls are more likely to dominate conversations with direct declaration of opinions
   2. boys are more likely to interrupt during a conversation while girls are more likely to encourage responses from others
   3. boys and girls in the school age period do use different conversational styles, but those styles are largely unrelated to the differences in styles of adult men and women
   4. there are no noticeable differences in how boys and girls speak over the school age period
8. One developmental improvement in narrative story telling involves children ability to make the referents of pronouns clear to the their listener. That is, when they say “she did it” they make it clear exactly who she is. This is an example of improved:
   1. cohesion.
   2. coherence.
   3. story grammar.
   4. noun compounding.
9. Suzy is a first grader who has the typical comprehension monitoring difficulties of a child her age. She is given a set of blocks and directions for how to arrange them, but the directions are incomplete and actually won’t lead to a coherent arrangement. Suzy is most likely to respond to these directions by:
   1. asking for more instructions so she can make the arrangement herself.
   2. asking the experimenter to arrange the blocks for her.
   3. arranging the blocks as best she can, as if she did not notice the instructions were bad.
   4. refusing to play with the blocks at all.
10. Which of the following is NOT an example of a nonliteral use of language?
    1. sarcasm
    2. metaphors
    3. yes/no questions
    4. all of the above are examples of nonliteral uses of language
11. Which of the following teachers would be most likely to improve the language abilities of the children in her class?
    1. a teacher who used very simple language, including simple sentences structures and easy vocabulary that the children would definitely be able to understand.
    2. a teacher who used a range of sentence types, including complex ones, and also used more advanced vocabulary items.
    3. a teacher who was insensitive to the cultural background of the students in her class.
    4. a teacher who focused on getting children to depend on the conversational context to interpret language.
12. Studies that compare children’s language abilities at the beginning of a school year and at the end of a school year have found that:
    1. children’s language abilities improve, and improve more than they do over an equally long period of time when the children are not in school.
    2. children’s language abilities improve, although they also improve an equivalent amount over an equally long period of time when the children are not in school.
    3. children’s ability to read and write improve, but their oral language skills are not affected by going to school.
    4. children’s language is already fully formed before children enter school.
13. Phonological awareness in pre-school aged children is important because it predicts:
    1. children’s ability to tell stories that are coherent and cohesive.
    2. children’s general willingness to learn in school.
    3. children’s reading ability through 4^th grade.
    4. children’s ability to hear non-native phonemic contrasts.
14. Which of the following is a good example decontextualized language?
    1. a teacher scaffolding a child’s story-telling
    2. a conversational shift in which the child provides information that is out of context for the listener
    3. a street sign, such as a stop sign
    4. a written story book
15. Which of the following is NOT true about developmental dyslexia?
    1. Children with dyslexia typically have trouble with phonological processing.
    2. The core problem in most cases of dyslexia involves letter recognition, such as the ability to distinguish among visually similar letters b and d.
    3. Boys are more likely to be identified as having dyslexia but girls suffer from it at approximately equal rates.
    4. All of the above answers are true statements about developmental dyslexia.
16. Over the school age period, children improve their ability to tell good narrative stories. Identify two specific aspects of story-telling which children gain skill with over this time period and provide examples. Be sure to explain why each of these aspects is important for telling a good story.
17. How does oral language skill change over the school years? Identify two elements of oral language and discuss how they change, and at least one factor that is important for causing that change.

3. Discuss the differences between the Whole Language and Phonics approaches to teaching children how to read. Which one would you advocate for and why? Be sure to discuss the processes involved in reading as well as children’s motivation to read.