Year: 2017
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Learning to Read English Introduction 1.English and its orthographyEnglish is widely spoken around the world as both a first language and a second language.Although English originated in Britain, the United States has the world's largest population of first-language speakers of English.The modern varieties of spoken English constitute dialects that vary in their mutual intelligibility.British English, American English, Australian English, South African English, and Scottish English are but a few of these.English as a second language is prevalent around the world.Although difficulties in calibrating proficiency levels across regions make it nearly impossible to identify the total number of English speakers, it is likely that the number of people who speak English as a second language exceeds the number who speak it as a first language.Written English is fundamentally alphabetic, despite the well known complexities of its orthography, which creates spellings that fail to have a one-to-one mapping to English phonemes.English writing contains both single-letter graphemes and multiletter graphemes that map onto spoken English at the phoneme level; that there are multiple mappings for a given grapheme is important for reading and writing. Synchronic and diachronic characterizationEnglish is classified as a Germanic language, resulting from two major invasions of Celtic Britain by Germanic groups (first Anglo Saxons from Northwestern Europe and then Scandinavians) in the 5 th through 9 th Centuries.The resulting period of Old English was disrupted by the Norman invasion, which brought dramatic changes to the language from French and Latin influences.These changes included not only additions of Latinate vocabulary, but also grammatical changes, especially reductions in inflectional morphology.This Norman period marked the beginning of modern English, which has remained largely unchanged in its basic structure since then.However, continuous change in pronunciation occurred over time.The most significant from a reading standpoint was the Great Vowel Shift during the 15 th through 18 th Centuries, in which English lost the pure vowels that occur in continental languages (Stockwell & Minkova, 2001).Vowels that had been produced lower in the vocal cavity moved up, such that "name" came to be pronounced with the long vowel that it has today.Prior to the shift, "name" was pronounced as the vowel in the German word "name," whose first syllable rhymes with the English word "Tom."This shift occurred over several long phases with the vowel first moving to the front: [ae] as in "pan" before raising to the long [e:] in "name."Finally, in some dialects the vowel became a diphthong, [ei], a glide across two simple vowels.Similarly, prior to the shift, the vowel in "mouse" was pronounced [u:] as in "moose," moving in stages to its present raised diphthong [aʊ] vowel.
Authors: Charles Perfetti, Lindsay Harris
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2760711932