This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
1.2 Writing systems
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
An overview
Writing systems; models of reading acquisition (the ‘decoding’ and ‘direct’ paths); the importance of automatization; bilingualism
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
So this course focuses on English as a written system, but it's actually quite
useful to think about broader written systems to put English in context.
And when we think about writing, so
it's essentially spoken language represented in a visual form.
And we can represent language in two main ways.
We can represent the sounds of the language, or we can represent the meaning,
or we can have a combination of both.
So English is what we call an alphabetic language.
So it actually uses the sounds of words as the visual symbols that it uses,
as in this example here.
And so each of these letters in the word bat, we can also call a grapheme.
So this is a visual symbol that is used to represent part of a language.
So English alphabetic system, what we call these small units of sound are phonemes.
These are the smallest units of sound that a language can use.
And so there's quite a lot of alphabetic languages that use phoneme-size
units to represent words, and here are a few examples on this slide.
And as you can see from this slide,
many languages derived from Greek and Latin use this alphabetic system.
But also languages like Hebrew and
also Cyrillic languages are based on alphabetic scripts,
even if the script isn't so familiar to the user of something like English.
So we have this set of languages.
We also have languages that don't use such a small unit of sound that
is represented as visual symbols.
So for example, Modern Yi, which is a chinese language actually,
uses syllable-size sounds to be represented visually,
as you'll see in this example here.
And then we have a set of languages where there is very little sound represented in
the visual systems, and so we call these logographic languages.
And many Chinese dialects are actually the maybe most widely
known logographic languages, so for example Mandarin.
And so here,
although there are some sound information included in the visual characters,
they're actually much more using meaning as the way of transmitting information.
So here in this slide we have an example of the character for
the word book, and then we also have the character for the word library.
And so you can see, a library is obviously a store of books.
And in the characters,
you can see that shared meaning by a replication of the same symbol.
Whereas if you look at the English words, so book and
library, these have no visual similarity to each other.
And so with the English it's just the sounds that are being represented there.
We're not seeing the shared meaning in the visual word forms.
So typically languages, there's a continuum of those that represent sound,
those that represent meaning.
Because in English we do have certain letter patterns that
are more meaning-based than sound-based.
But then, especially with English,
there's a kind of added layer of messiness, we could call it.
And so while you could say, well, sounds are represented by symbols,
that sounds quite straight forward.
Language is a dynamic thing, they don't stay static, and so they change over time.
So oral language changes, but
written language is often a bit slow at catching up.
And so we particularly see this in a old language like English.
And again, we can take the example of the word book again.
So if we look at the word book, so we see two vowel letters.
And in a purely phonetic system this would suggest a long vowel sound.
In older English, actually the word book was pronounced with a longer vowel,
perhaps sounding like book.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, we had a big vowel shift in English,
so in the 1300s and the 1600s vowels changed their sound.
So that the original [SOUND] sound in this word actually became shorter,
to sound more like how we say it now, book.
Whereas, so the oral language changed, but the written language has stayed the same.
And so the great vowel shift is quite a dramatic example, but
languages are always slightly shifting.
And so this is why languages like English are much less regular than
a newer language.
So, for example, Finish has only had a written form for
relatively a much shorter time.
And so the sound letter relationships in Finnish still remain much more consistent.
And so you might hear a term transparency to represent this relationship,
so Finnish is a very transparent language.
The letter sound correspondences are nice and predictable.
Whereas English, where there's been both these vowel shifts, there's
been the introduction of words from other languages and many other shifts,
this means that it's actually a lot less transparent and less regular.
So, this actually has big implications for children learning to read.
Because, as you might guess, it's actually a harder task when
the letter sound correspondences or the rules are not so consistent.
And so there is actually now evidence, there was a study that
looked at children learning to read across many European countries.
And this study actually found that children learning English,
although having similar intensity of instruction,
were actually learning the basic word recognition skills.
It was taking them longer than in more transparent languages, such as Finnish or
Greek, and this was not a result of inferior teaching or anything like that.
It's really felt that teaching techniques aside,
there's just more to learn with a language like English.
So this can be why we actually see reading difficulties can be more manifest
because actually it's easier to struggle with English, we could say.
This also mean,
if we think about different types of qualities of language and writing systems,
it also has an impact on what will predict success in learning to read.
So in alphabetic languages,
we've said that sound is quite clearly represented in the symbols.
And so in turn, this means that sound awareness,
we call this phonological awareness, and
we'll talk about this more in future segments and weeks.
This sound awareness, because it's so critical to the writing system,
is actually a key predictor in many alphabetic languages
of whether a child is going to be a successful reader or not.
And so you can assess phonological awareness early on, and
it will actually give you a good sense of whether a child is at risk or not.
And as I say, next week we'll actually talk about some of the ways
that you can assess phonological awareness.
Whereas a logographic language like Mandarin,
because the sound information is less critical, phonological awareness,
we're now coming to understand, it does still predict some
of the trajectory of reading in Mandarin speaking children.
But actually, we see that things like visual memory and also something
called morphological awareness is important if you are learning Chinese.
Morphological awareness, these are the little segments of words that represent
grammar, and grammar can be a kind of gateway into meaning.
So different types of skills are going to be predictive for
different languages, and this is important as we think about early detection.
For more information about specific qualities of languages,
you can go to the Dyslexia International website.
And also we will post some of this information on the course site,
where there's more specific information about the main six world languages.
So there you'll see some more aspects and get a sense of whether languages
are alphabetic, how transparent they are, and some of the predictors of reading.
And my final slide here is showing that it's also important to
think about reading direction.
Many languages, including English,
we will read from left to right, and we assume that that's the norm.
Whereas in languages such as Hebrew, you read the other way.
So, languages can vary in so many dimensions,
which is really quite fun to think about.
So as we now move forward returning to talking more about English,
do keep these differences in mind.
And think about how they are going to impact the experience of learning to read.
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