[senco-forum] Re Teaching Vocabulary

This assumes that hearing phonemes is carried out in the same area of the
brain as producing them - this is not what actually happens in brain scans.

Brains are peculiar things - differentiation of function can be down to one
brain cell (so says Oliver Sacks).  The book I referred to - The Learning
Brain -  some time ago on the forum by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith
makes it explicitly clear that children are born with the ability to
perceive phonemes.  This ability is TRIMMED through experience, not grown
(now APD people might be different here, that much has not been researched).

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to know more of how the
brain works.  The times when we hypothesised about how the brain works
(where the research has been carried out and that is not in many areas yet
as the machines are so new), rather than popping someone into a magnetic
imager, seem to have passed.

Philippa

On 2/12/07, dolfrog <dolfrog at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Maggie
>
> No one has any phonemes hardwired into them, otherwise all could speak
> from
> birth.
>
> Best wishes
>
> dolfrog
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
> [mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Maggie Downie
> Sent: 11 February 2007 12:17
> To: Olanys at aol.com; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
> Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Re Teaching Vocabulary
>
> Can you tell me what the difference is between hearing a 'whole word' and
> hearing a phoneme?
>
> How do APDs learn to talk; in view of the fact that most infants learn to
> talk by stringing together the phonemes they already have 'hardwired' into
> them (leaving aside profoundly deaf infants, which are not part of this
> debate) in the sequences which comprise the words of the language spoken
> around them?
>
> I f you can give me a research evidence based explanation of how APDs
> bypass
> this process in learning to talk (if they do bypass it) then I might be
> able
> to understand the assertion that APDs cannot work at phoneme level when
> learning to read.
>
> Maggie
>
> Olanys at aol.com wrote:
>
>
>
> "That  rather suggests that you have learned coping strategies which you
> should be
> sharing with others and particularly with teachers who will be
> confronting children with APD."
>
>
>
> He has - it's called whole word teaching which he advocates as  an option
> for
> those that need it...  and like my son, and one of his,  he is a
> visual-spatial learner, and shares that fact too with anyone
> and  everyone.
> Everyone with
> APD has their own coping strategies, often unknown to  them.
>
> "I think it  would be more productive if you made suggestions as to how
> teachers should  respond to children with APD and also how they should
> not respond. You are  much better placed to do this then anyone else I
> know. "
>
> See above, he  does and so do I and we have been for at least 5 years!
>
> " But  having said that, words can still only be heard. They cannot be
> seen"
>
> As I said in  my previous email, words can be seen, in written
> representation
> on the page,  they need to be written otherwise there would be nothing
> read,
>
> you cannot "read"  sounds, you can only hear them.
>
> Words are a  variety of sounds in different combinations. But you must
> have
> the sounds before  you can visually represent them so learning spoken
> vocabulary, which was all we  had in ancient times pre-writing and
> reading,
> is the
> natural thing to master  before mastering reading, otherwise children
> would
> be
> born able to read before  they could talk.
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
> Aly
>
> Chair Auditory  Processing Disorder in the UK/APDUK
> www.lacewingmultimedia.com/APD.htm
> www.apduk.org
>
>
>
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