Our Youngest Guest Speaker!

For the past few weeks, our Linguistics class has been talking about Language Acquisition.  The timing has worked out perfectly with the AP Psych class focusing on Language as well.  On the day before Winter Break, my son Ben came in to talk to my students so that they could observe for themselves characteristics of speech in a child who is two years, eleven months old.  I told my son that he was coming in to talk to my students about trucks.  I told him that my students didn't know the difference between an excavator and a front end loader:  his response was "Why??"  He also said he might talk to them about baseball, another one of his favorite topics.  I made sure to have plenty of toys available for him to interact with, my mother-in-law read us a story, and the class also presented Ben with a gift of a new truck to thank him for coming in.  The highlight of the hour was when Ben realized that he could get the class to repeat after him.  He would hold up an object and say, "Everybody say 'Eraser!' or 'Blanket!' or 'Truck!'."

Thanks to Zoe for taking pictures!

The students' homework over the break is to spend thirty minutes observing the language of a child between the ages of birth and four years old.  The students can choose to interact with the child themselves or to watch a parent, relative, sibling, or friend interact with the child.  The students will be taking note of the sounds, words, phrases, and/or sentences the child produces.  Each student will write a paper summarizing their experience, and they will share what they learned with the class in an oral presentation.

Fun with Phonetics!

Check out the University of Iowa's website on Phonetics at http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/.  It is an interactive website where you can click on the different sounds of American English, Spanish, and German and see how the sound is produced.  It is a great tool for explaining to students the differences between consonants and vowels and for studying the place and manner of articulation.  I model for my students how the website works and then they use their headphones and laptops to do more exploring.