Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 2, Day 3) – Looking into Language

Posted by hallep on Wednesday, June 22, 2016 in Grade 3, Grade 4, SAVY.

Today we worked more with phonology, and we were introduced to morphology–how words are made and used. In the morning we had a Mystery Hunt in which students worked in teams to find clues based on instructions written in the IPA. Along with their adult chaperones, students ran all over Peabody’s campus, having fun and practicing their knowledge of the IPA at the same time. After that activity, we came back to the classroom and practiced recognizing particular phonemes in speech. For example, we watched a video in which a New Yorker and Californian talked about how they pronounced various words, and we transcribed those different pronunciations using the IPA. We all noticed that the vowels are especially tricky!

After lunch we began to think about our class projects, which will involve inventing our own language. We went through the different components of languages, including phonology, morphology and syntax. We listened to some phonemes and phonemic distinctions used in languages other than English, including clicks, tones and aspirated consonants. Finally we talked about morphemes, the smallest units of language that have meaning. We explored our intuitive understandings of how words are derived by playing a game wherein we made up a new word and then derived additional new words from it. We will continue to explore morphology tomorrow.