By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts. These unique abilities of communicating through a native language clearly separate...
Traditional approaches used to treat foreign language teaching and learning as a package of knowledge that needed to be analysed and observed, as successive series of rules –mostly grammatical - that needed to be learnt before moving on to further sets of...
Speech and Writing involve production on the part of the language user, which is why they are called productive skills. Listening and Reading are receptive skills. Frequently, a person uses a combination of abilities. For example, a participant in a conversation is...
The art of writing was a professional skill. By 1700, Europe's literacy rate ranged from 30 to 40 percent; by 1850, it was 50 to 55 percent; and by the second half of the 19th century writing became a basic qualification in human societies. Today...
Although Mandarin Chinese is the language spoken by the largest number of people, English is spoken in all continents, and therefore, it is the most widespread language on earth: It is the language spoken in the British Isles, North America, Australia and New Zealand...
Language is a system of gestures, grammar, signs, sounds, symbols, or words, used to represent and communicate concepts, ideas, meanings, and thoughts. The study of language as such a code is called linguistics, an academic discipline which runs along two major...
First of all, we need to mention the natural order in which children learn their mother tongue, as this natural order is usually taken into account when teaching a second or foreign language: Babies or very young infants listen to the sounds they hear without...
The present essay deals with children’s acquisition of literacy (alfabetismo) through the development of two language skills, reading and writing. In children’s mother language, these two skills are intertwined in early learning. For example, the physical act of writing...
It is important to distinguish two concepts: phonetics and phonology. PHONETICS is the science that studies the language sounds; how sounds are produced in general. PHONOLOGY is the study of the sound system of a particular language. It includes stress, rhythm...
The orthography of a language is the set of rules of how to write correctly in the language. The term is derived from Greek ortho- ("correct") and graphos ("writing"). In this topic we shall deal with the relationship between phonemes and graphemes. A phoneme...