COMS 3063 quiz 8 Flashcards

Text (reading)

Metalinguistic Competence

Reading becomes an important source of vocabulary growth and abstract word learning

Maintaining a conversation on an abstract topic

True

Understanding abstract vocabulary and multiple meanings of words

Children learn to adjust their communication style depending on their conversational partner

GFTA 3

Metalinguistic and pragmatic language skills—he is having difficulty understanding nonliteral language and social meaning

Shifting Sources of Language Input
Before the school-age years, children’s sole source of language input is oral. How-
ever, once children learn to read, they can acquire language input from text as
well. Beginning at around age 8–10 years, children shift to gaining more and more
of their language input from text. As a result of increased exposure to language
through reading, children develop language in an increasingly individualized
manner (Nippold, 1998). For example, a child who is interested in cars and reads
books about cars will likely acquire a set of car-related vocabulary words, including
carburetor, transmission, and spark plugs.

Initial reading, or decoding, stage: Stage 1 covers the period of kindergar-
ten through first grade, when children are about 5–7 years old. During this stage,
children begin to decode (or sound out) words by associating letters with corre-
sponding sounds in spoken words

Confirmation, fluency, and ungluing from print: Stage 2 covers the period
of second to third grade, when children are about 7–8 years old. During this stage,
children hone the decoding skills they learned in Stage 1 and experience confir-
mation as they become more confident in the reading skills they have gained. As
children read familiar texts, they become particularly proficient with high-frequency
words, and use the redundancies of language to gain fluency and speed in reading.

Reading to learn the new—a first step: Stage 3 lasts from grade 4 to grades
8 or 9, when children are about age 9–14 years. During Stage 3, children read to
gain new information and are solidly reading to learn by the end of this stage. Chall
suggested thinking about Stage 3 in two distinct phases. In the first phase, Stage
3A (grades 4–6, or ages 9–11 years), children develop the ability to read beyond
egocentric purposes so that they can read about and learn conventional information
about the world. By the end of Stage 3A, children can read works of typical adult
length, but not at the adult level of reading difficulty. In Stage 3B (grades 7–8 or 9
and ages 12–14 years), children can read on a general adult leve

Multiple viewpoints—high school: Stage 4 covers the high school period,
between ages 14 and 18 years. During Stage 4, students learn to navigate increas-
ingly difficult concepts and the texts that describe them. The most important differ-
ence between reading in Stage 3 and reading in Stage 4 is that in Stage 4, children
can consider multiple viewpoints on an issue. Stage 4 necessarily builds on the
knowledge in Stage 3, when children read to learn, because without the back-
ground knowledge from Stage 3, children would not be able to read more difficult
texts with multiple sets of facts, theories, and viewpoints.

Multiple viewpoints—high school: Stage 4 covers the high school period,
between ages 14 and 18 years. During Stage 4, students learn to navigate increas-
ingly difficult concepts and the texts that describe them. The most important differ-
ence between reading in Stage 3 and reading in Stage 4 is that in Stage 4, children
can consider multiple viewpoints on an issue. Stage 4 necessarily builds on the
knowledge in Stage 3, when children read to learn, because without the back-
ground knowledge from Stage 3, children would not be able to read more difficult
texts with multiple sets of facts, theories, and viewpoints.

Construction and reconstruction—a world view: college: Stage 5 occurs
from about age 18 on. During Stage 5, readers read selectively to suit their purposes.
Reading selectively involves knowing which portions of a text to read—whether it
be the beginning, middle, or end of the text or some combination thereof. Readers
also make judgments about what to read, how much to read, and at what level
of detail to achieve comprehension. Readers at Stage 5 use advanced cognitive

metalinguistic competence—or the abil-
ity to think about and analyze language as an object of attention—in the preschool
years, their competence increases significantly in the school-age years and beyond.

Phonological Awareness
In Chapter 7, we defined phonological awareness as children’s sensitivity to the
sound structure of language. Although children generally master some early-devel-
oping phonological awareness abilities in the preschool years (segmenting words
from sentences, segmenting multisyllabic words, detecting and producing rhymes),
they usually do not master some of the later-developing abilities until kindergar-
ten or first grade. The later-developing abilities in phonological awareness involve
awareness of the smallest units of sound (phonemes) and include blending sounds,
segmenting sounds from words, and manipulating sounds (see, for example,
Schuele & Boudreau, 2008). This level of phonological awareness is termed pho-
nemic awareness to indicate the child must attend to the phonemes, or individual
speech sounds in syllables and words.

Language that people use in nonliteral and often abstract ways is called figura-
tive language. Using figurative language is a metalinguistic ability because children
must recognize language as an arbitrary code (Westby, 1998). People use figurative
language to evoke mental images in the minds of their listeners, or to provide em-
phasis or highlight something in an interesting way. Figurative language includes
metaphors, similes, hyperboles, idioms, irony, and proverbs.

A metaphor conveys similarity between two ideas or objects by stat-
ing that those two ideas or objects are the same (see Figure 8.1 for an example). Met-
aphors consist of a term called the topic or the target, which is compared to another
term called the vehicle or the base. The topic (target) and the vehicle (base) share
features, and form the basis of comparison called the ground. Metaphors can be of
at least two types: predictive and proportional (Table 8.1). We use metaphors often
in our everyday conversations and using metaphors seems to help us communicate
about and reason with abstract concepts, such as time and emotion (Bowdle &

Similes are similar to predictive metaphors in that they contain a topic,
a vehicle, and the ground. They are different in that they make the comparison
between the topic and vehicle explicit by using the word like or as. Common sim-
iles using like include like water off a duck’s back and sitting like a bump on a log.
Common similes using as include quiet as a mouse and flat as a pancake. Nippold
(1998) summarized research results indicating that the extent to which children
use similes (and metaphors) relates to situational factors, including whether the
children are engaging in a formal writing task or comparing dissimilar objects. Chil-
dren’s ability to understand and produce similes and metaphors is related to their
performance on measures of general cognition, language, and academic achieve-
ment. However, whether these abilities are prerequisites to understanding and pro-
ducing metaphors and similes is unclear.

Hyperbole is a form of figurative language that uses exaggeration
for emphasis or effect. Examples of hyperbole include I’m so hungry, I could eat a
horse, and I nearly died laughing. Research examining children’s understanding of
hyperbole (and other forms of figurative language) is somewhat inconclusive. For
example, Creusere (1999) summarized research results showing that salient intona-
tion patterns may help 8- and 10-year-olds’ comprehension of hyperbole, or chil-
dren may make use of the discrepancy between the literal and intended meanings
of an utterance to determine the speaker’s intent. In the first case, to understand the
hyperbole, children would exploit paralinguistic cues (intonation patterns), whereas
in the second case they would exploit pragmatic cues.

Idioms are expressions containing both a literal and a figurative meaning.
I’ve put that on the back burner, and We’re in the same boat are examples of idioms.
Illustrations of two common idioms appear in Figure 8.2. People use two major
types of idioms: opaque and transparent (Gibbs, 1987, cited in Nippold, 1998).
Opaque idioms demonstrate little relationship between the literal interpretation and
the figurative interpretation (e.g., drive someone up the wall), whereas the figurative
meaning of a transparent idiom is an extension of the literal meaning (e.g., hold
one’s tongue). Gibbs’s study showed that children ages 5, 6, 8, and 9 years could

Irony and sarcasm are types of figurative language for
which a speaker’s intentions differ from the literal meaning of the words he or
she uses. Although the terms irony and sarcasm both refer to unmet expectations,
they differ according to whether the statement relates to an expectation about a
specific individual or a general expectation (Glenwright & Pexman, 2010). More
specifically, irony refers to unmet general expectations that are not the fault of
an individual, whereas sarcasm refers to a specific individual’s failure to meet an
expectation. Consider the following two sentences (Glenwright & Pexman, 2010,
p. 432):

Proverbs are statements expressing the conventional values, beliefs,
and wisdom of a society (Nippold, 1998). Nippold reported that of the types of fig-
urative language, proverbs are one of the most difficult to master. Proverbs serve a
variety of communicative functions, such as the following:

Phonological Development
A few developments in phonology remain to be achieved during the school-age
years. Previously in this chapter, we described school-age children’s accomplish-
ments in phonological awareness, including their ability to segment syllables from
multisyllabic words and their ability to blend and manipulate the sounds in words.
In addition, children make progress in their morphophonemic development.

Morphological Development
Children’s morphological development is closely related to their syntactic develop-
ment. Major morphological developments in the school-age years include use of
derivational prefixes and derivational suffixes.

Complex Syntax Development
The most important achievements in form for school-age children involve complex
syntax. Complex syntax refers to developmentally advanced grammatical structures
that mark a “literate,” or decontextualized, language style (Paul, 1995). These struc-
tures occur relatively infrequently in spoken language, but when students use them
in written language, it indicates they have achieved more advanced levels of gram-
mar