Big Words Research Articles

Arcane Facts and New Words: Expanding Your Creative Talent

In response to constructive e-fan mail lamenting his occasional use of big words, columnist Phil Emma takes us on a sesquipedalian jaunt through the realm of the intellectually curious--from the Blue Note jazz club, to a chat with dizygotic Abkhaz twins at Vabj, in Bhuj, to a formal description of the Three Stooges in Backus-Naur form.

Literacy and Visual Impairment

Research supporting specific instructional approaches for young children with visual impairments and blindness is limited. There is, however, a growing body of evidence to support the belief that the critical components of emergent and early conventional literacy for children with visual impairments do not differ markedly from those of their sighted peers. Specifically, infants and toddlers with visual impairments and blindness require interactions that support their oral language development, awareness of print or braille, and opportunities to explore writing. Although these very young children are often delayed in developing emergent literacy understandings, the path of their development is consistent with emergent literacy development of sighted children. The research regarding older children with visual impairments and blindness suggests that they too benefit from instruction that emphasizes the critical elements of early literacy instruction for all children. Research also suggests that specific strategies, such as repeated readings, direct instruction in phonics, and big word decoding that emphasizes morphemes, can benefit school-aged children with visual impairments and blindness. Further research is needed if we are to understand fully the most effective approaches to emergent and early literacy instruction for children with visual impairments and blindness, but there is a solid base from which we can begin.

Simplifying Neurology Terms

Neurology has many seemingly conflicting concepts. It is mostly because we use big words and confusing terms. Just when we know the definitions of the terms, the great neurology gods change them for better clarity. Examples of this are when the headache and seizure labels were changed (Table 1).

Fairness, Equality, and Democracy: Three Big Words

Sidney Verba Fairness, Equality, and Democracy: Three Big Words WHAT IS A FAIR POLITY? IT ALL DEPENDS, AS ONE MIGHT SAY, ON WHAT FAIR IS. FAIRNESS CAN m ean many things. Whatever it may mean (within the realm of common meanings of the term), it is important; and this for several reasons. Governments make collective decisions for a political unit, decisions that are binding and authoritative for a collectivity. These decisions play a major role in determining the nature of the social and economic systems in which they are made. The crucial nature of such decisions for the welfare of those affected by them easily explains why their fairness is important to the way in which those subject to these decisions evaluate them. In this paper Iwill focus on what might be meant by fairness in a democratic regime. There maybe more general fairness criteria applica­ ble to any political system—democratic or authoritarian—but fairness in relation to political decisions is especially central in a democracy. Democratic regimes are supposed to be run by the citizemy—or at least the citizenry ought to be the ultimate authority. Democracies depend on legitimacy to function effectively; only when a regime is considered legitimate can it rule by consent rather than coercion. Democratic regimes cannot rely on coercion to govern and long remain democratic. Thus, public acceptance is important. This also explains why the public determination of what is fair—both as a matter of principle and in the social research Vol 73 : No 2 : Summer 2006 499 evaluation of particular actions of particular governments—is central in democratic rule. The criterion for democratic fairness I put forward is political equality. I do not argue that political equality is the only possible crite­ rion of democratic fairness or that fairness is the only criterion forjudg­ ing a democracy, only that political equality is an important criterion for fairness in a democracy. Further, I argue that political equality as a criterion for a fair democratic political system is more crucial than is equality of income or wealth for a fair economy or equality of respect for a fair cultural or social system. I will try to define political equal­ ity to show why it is central to conceptions of a fair democratic polity, and—since I am more a foot-on-the-ground empirical researcher than philosophical thinker—show why it is, in fact, impossible to attain, would not be an unambiguous blessing if attained, but is, nevertheless, worth pursuing. I shall be dealing with issues of fairness in democracy generally, but will draw examples and material mainly from American politics. I would think that the same general principles apply else­ where, although the distribution of the impediments to achieving fair­ ness—one of my major themes—will vary. WHAT, THEN, IS FAIRNESS IN POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT? Who Decides What’s Fair? Is it philosophers and scholars of politics? Is it those with an active role in politics, whether in the media or more directly as activists, campaign­ ers, or officials? Is it the public? There is a role for each. This paper will draw on the views that political philosophers have put forward in rela­ tion to fairness, the activities of political elites that might be construed as fair or not, and the perceptions of ordinaiy citizens at to what is considered to be fair. In preparing this paper, I looked at the way in which fairness and politics are linked in ordinaiy political discourse. A crude search using Lexis-Nexis during the 2004 election period makes clear that the two terms (and their variations) are often linked. Space precludes listing all 5 0 0 social research the many meanings given to political fairness, but a few points can be made: ►Notions of fairness are often invoked in relation to democracy. Though democracy and fairness may each mean many things, they are expected to go together. ►Fairness may refer to the output of a political system: taxes should be fair. Laws should be impartial and not unfairly fairly benefit one group over another. ►Fairness may also refer to process rather than output. Processes should be honest and transparent, be unbiased: promises should...

This Is the Dream (review)

Reviewed by: This Is the Dream Deborah Stevenson Shore, Diane Z . This Is the Dream; by Diane Z. Shore and Jessica Alexander; illus. by James Ransome. Amistad/HarperCollins, 2006 [40p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-055520-3$16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-055519-X$15.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs This succinct poetic history of the civil rights movement begins with a survey of prominent aspects of segregation (separate water fountains, separate seats on the bus and in restaurants, separate sections in libraries and separate schools), then describes key actions of resistance (integrating schools, boycotting buses, sitting at lunch counters); finally, it depicts the results of the battle, a present where people can sit in restaurants, on buses, and in libraries and schools together. The approach may sound like a recipe for purposive disaster, but the book is genuinely successful. Shore and Alexander wisely resist the robotic fidelity to the "House That Jack Built" cumulation that the first line ("These are the fountains that stand in the square") and rhymed couplets suggest, instead simply using the "these are the" formula and tight rhyme scheme as effective structuring devices. Though the poetry is a little uneven, their focus on concrete, kid-understandable discrimination and specific responses makes this an unusually accessible explanation, and they manage to give credit both to the leaders and the foot soldiers in the movement. Ransome's double-page portraiture employs his familiar thickly pigmented brushstrokes and smooth, three-dimensional modeling (red, white, and blue runs as a subtle motif throughout), with images subtly reminding viewers that it often wasn't just a case of "separate" but also "inferior." In some spreads, he augments his painterly images with period photographs, often running in strips of collage across the top of the page that balance out the text boxes along the bottom; the dramatic turning point visually counterpoints his portraits of four key leaders against a photographic backdrop of teeming marchers and activists, paralleling the text's embrace of contributors unknown as well as known. This takes a tough subject for youthful understanding and distills it into a clear and compelling narrative, making it a valuable tool for [End Page 285] curricular use; pair it with an early biography such as Rappaport's Martin's Big Words (BCCB 1/02) to balance out the broader view with an individual story. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Down and almost out in Scotland: George Orwell, tuberculosis and getting streptomycin in 1948

On Christmas Eve 1947, Eric Blair (pen-name, George Orwell) was admitted to Hairmyres Hospital near Glasgow.2 George Orwell (Figure 1) was a journalist and novelist, and the publication in 1945 of his political fable, Animal Farm,3 had made him famous. He was 44 years old, and tests at the hospital confirmed that he had infectious chronic tuberculosis in his lungs.4 Orwell has been described as ‘a representative of truth-telling, objectivity and verification’.5 As with other events in his life, he carefully analysed and documented his experience of care for his tuberculosis, including his time in a private sanitorium. Orwell had been given treatments that were common for tuberculosis in Britain at that time: ‘collapse therapy’ and other painful surgical procedures to keep the lung disabled to ‘rest’ it, vitamins, fresh air, and being confined to bed. The hospital staff confiscated his typewriter and told him to stop working6—but they didn’t seem to advise him to stop smoking! (Figure 2) Orwell’s work, a novel he would struggle to complete in the coming year—1948, was Orwell’s ‘last great obsession’.7 He twisted the numbers of that year to give the book one of the most famous titles and powerful symbols from the 20th century: Nineteen EightyFour,8 introducing Big Brother and words like ‘doublespeak’ to the international political and social landscape (Figure 3). Orwell was hopeful:

A Motivation Letter

Once upon a time, there was a pre-pharmacy student who wrote a “motivation letter”. As was the case for all applicants to the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy, she had to convince the selection committee (in 500 words) that her motivation for becoming a pharmacist qualified her for acceptance to pharmacy school. That student was me, and I vividly recall how I struggled to write that letter. I ended up listing such lofty goals as “helping mankind by making a significant difference in the well-being of patients” and “having a fulfilling professional career”. Now, almost 32 years later, I find myself writing another motivation letter. As I embark on my 5-year term as Editor of CJHP, I ask myself what exactly has motivated me to take on this major endeavour. This time, the answer is easy and requires just 16 words: “I would like to give something back to the profession that has given me so much.” Little did I appreciate that those big words in my pharmacy motivation letter would ring so true and be so directly applicable today in my role as Editor. Back then, I used the words more as a way to gain acceptance to pharmacy school than to describe my true feelings. Now, I can’t think of words any more appropriate to describe exactly how I feel.

Economics Education in Siberia: Challenges, Problems, and Optimism

Contemporary Economics education is one of the major steps on the way of developing a new economy in Russia. Its major goal is teaching secondary school and university students to make effective decisions and to be responsible citizens. What do these big words mean? What economic issues are secondary school graduates likely to encounter when they grow up, and in what circumstances is it going to happen? How is Economics education in Russian secondary schools and universities responding to the challenges of time? The author of the article has been teaching Economics at secondary schools and university since 1998. In this paper, she shares her experience and reflections on the questions stated above, and is inviting her colleagues to discussion.

The Juxtaposition of Brown

The Juxtaposition of Brown Laura C. Weber (bio) I had been writing a letter to my superior over a period of four weeks in defense of my ascendancy over my co-workers. After all, I was clearly the most educated in the matter, and, frankly, I consider it the duty of the educated to set the ignorant straight of their illiteracies. I had been an English and British Literature major for my bachelor's and master's degrees, respectively. What did my boss and my fellow employees at Chip's Paint Chips know about Joyce and Keats? What of Austen and Woolf? And so I decided, as it were, that I must move on to more advantageous career paths—more specifically, to writing and publishing my forthcoming book. To properly head the letter, I began, "Mine Own Two Weeks Notice." I worked and reworked each sentence to achieve the appropriate effect of wit and charm, trying my best to avoid what could be perceived as condescension, which it most assuredly was not. True, there is nothing like a good smite once in a while (and grant you, I was well beyond my smite-control breaking point), but this was neither the time nor the place. I made sure to employ as many big words as possible to give but a taste of my inner cornucopia of wordage. I used "pedantic" and "nihilist" and "rhododendron." I considered informing my supervisor that "stewardesses" is the longest word in the English language that one can type on a keyboard utilizing the left hand only, but decided against it for reasons of caricature. By the time I had written "Yours Truly," I had long since forgotten my concern over vanity and had acquiesced to at least six self-pats on the back. My job description was "Head Color Namographer" of the Browns and Reds Department, a title that I abhorred for the fanciful word. However, I never denied pity for the poor soul who invented it. Most likely the holder of an associate's degree, at best. What did he know of Dickens? What of Stevenson? I had developed an undesirable hatred for those outside of Browns and Reds. I was left watching minutes tick by on my desk clock while Donny, a fellow patron of the color-naming arts, was restful from nine to five in Blues and Greens. Something about that department pained me. The people always seemed intellectually stimulated and had a slightly patronizing bounce in their step. Perhaps it was the hues and tints of the [End Page 3] colors. Any form of aqua can have a soothing effect, what with names like "Seafoam." Conversely, staring at a brown or a red all day can really sear away at a person's soul. (Remember: Searing Soul) How many more "Burnt Siennas" would I have to title "Hot Chocolate" or "Chilean Stew" or "Kidney Bean" before I went absolutely bananas? And then there was Donny with his thick hair and his thick smile and his thick fingers, but—most importantly—his thick thesaurus. He only needed to open that imbecilic book to gather as many words as there are days in a lifetime to replace "thick" with "bulky," "burly," "coagulated," or "gelatinous." No one said you couldn't use a thesaurus, but it was in my nature to believe that it was cheating. How could one not be totally satisfied in a world eased by short cuts and colors waiting to be named "Summer Breeze" and "Cool as a Cucumber"? Give me a break. Blues and Greens were practically a holiday next to the burning hell of Browns and Reds. (Remember: Burning Hell) There was so much more potential, so many more avenues to pursue. Day in and day out, after finishing my daily naming of "Flame" and "Lipstick," I fantasized about screaming at Donny and giving him the finger. I'd say, "Fuck you Donny." I had grown far too comfortable with such elementary surroundings. Flame. Lipstick. Ha! Such juvenile sentiments. It was also not so uncommon for me to daydream about infusing my intellect with the world of Blues and Greens and blowing everyone away. These fools had no...

Keywords: Raymond Williams and Others

THE WORD KEYWORD itself does not appear in Dr Johnson's Dictionary, and it did not enter the vocabulary until the mid-nineteenth century, where it stood, broadly, for that which is central or essential. Increasingly dated with the sciences and with computerized access to knowledge, it was first promoted to philosophical significance by Raymond Williams, whose Keywords was first published in 1975 In that brilliant little book, which was a spin-off from his Culture and Society published nearly twenty years earlier, Williams completed an intellectual task which he had found necessary for his own survival in Britain after World War n; that is to say, relating his grasp of the rapidly evolving world to which he returned after military service to his understanding of the big words deployed in and by that society; their history as words, or philological evolution; their history as words in social time, whose meanings had changed because the world around them changed; and their political history, a subject in which Williams was particularly invested. Raymond Williams deserves to be remembered as a totality, not merely as the author of Keywords. Born into a working-class family in Wales, Williams got as far as an M .A. at Cambridge before going to war, in an antitank regiment, in 1941. After the war he spent 20 years as an extra-mural teacher at Oxford, learning about the value of education the hard way, by delivering it to working adults who had for class reasons been excluded from it. In the 1950s he began to publish, and by the time he died in 1988 his resume included 650 publications, including 27 academic books, 5 novels, 3 plays, and more than 500 articles and reviews. He was one of the first to appreciate the opportunities and perils of television. He was one of the first of the so-called historians, or critics, or materialists (each shades into the other), and was enormously influential in the new discipline of studies that developed in Birmingham under Richard Hoggart, followed by Stuart Hall. Nowadays cultural studs itself has become a key-phrase for things going on the academy that not everyone approves of. What Williams accomplished was to reunite vague conceptual terms (creativity, culture individual and some and some clearly material facts (education, literacy, the press, television, drama) in a loose family of social and historical relationships that gave added meaning to both. For Williams, democracy, a crucial keyword for both of us, is indissolubly connected to public education and hence to literacy in the broadest sense. William was an educational socialist. By the late 1960s, he might have become a little too much of a Marxist for his own theoretical longevity, though he consistently critiqued vulgar Marxism for its overemphasis on mere economic causation. By 1975, when he published Keywords, William had arrived at the doctrine that language itself is causative, that the active meanings and values expressed in language exert a formative social force. When I say language itself, I do not imply an impersonal force independent of human speakers and writers. Williams's theory was in fact a reaction against the notion of a sealed-off world of language, whether bellelettrist or Derridean. But you cannot fully understand the subtle engineering of men, by men, that words enable and, more importantly, you cannot yourself become an engineer, unless you know the social etymology of words, their function over historical time. Because he was an optimist, for Williams this formative social force, if widely understood, might eventually lead us to a better kind of democracy. In his disarmingly modest introduction to Keywords, as modest as Johnson's but without the melancholy, Williams told his audience in 1975 that it all began with his dissatisfaction with the big word culture, with the way in which it bore several quite distinct meanings in ordinary conversation, meanings which didn't seem to be cognate with each other. …

The family of quadrilaterals

Your first reaction may be that the word ‘quadrilateral’ is too difficult for young children. But don't be afraid of using big words - most children love them and quickly learn how to use them. If you feel it is inappropriate with your children, you could call it the family of four (emphasising the four straight edges and four corners).

Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. By Maurice O. Wallace. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xiv, 236 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223- 2854-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2869-0.)

Professor Maurice O. Wallace's Constructing the Black Masculine is a postmodernist interpretation of the construction of black masculinity in memoirs, autobiography, novels, and photography. Having read this book I am glad I am a historian. For most historians, writing is still a matter of both clarity and communication. It is not a display of vocabularistic pyrotechnics in which the use of unpronounceable big words becomes an end in itself. This can be seen in Wallace's discussion of a 1994 cover of a New York Times Magazine depicting the back of a black man's head (p. 20). For example, just what does the following passage mean? From this perspective, the impossibility of a reciprocal gaze to disrupt the machinations of alterity by force of what Kaja Silverman has referred to as “heteropathicidentification” provides the white reader of the magazine the ability to safely and imaginatively explore what he religiously believes is not the self without having to witness what grief, affliction, or rage, such experiments countenance. (p. 32)

Children’s Literature as Child Pornography

WHILE THEY BOTH CENTRALLY CONCERN CHILD CHARACTERS children's literature and child pornography appear to have nothing to do with each other. Children's literature is writing intended for an audience of children. Child pornography, obviously, is not. That it stages activities involving for an implied audience of adults is a main reason why child pornography is scandalous, and why we have laws circumscribing it. For a lot of adults, the idea that might be the audience for pornography is almost as horrifying as the idea that pornography can be about children. But let me assume for a moment that the provisions of the criminal code might affect children's literature. In economic terms, its implied audience of is something of an illusion. As well as being the people who write children's literature, adults like you and me are also the ones who edit it, publish it, review it, sell it, and buy it. In she process, these adults are often readers of children's literature. Jack Zipes declares, My guess is that the largest reading audience of children's books in the United States and England is constituted by those students at the college and university level who take courses in children's literature along with teachers, librarians, and writers, who eagerly and discriminatingly read vast numbers of books for children (54). As a form of writing that, like child pornography, stages childhood experience for a significantly adult audience, might children's literature, too, be at least potentially pornographic? Might texts of children's literature then come under the purview of the criminal code? The idea that it might is likely to strike most adults as outrageous--perhaps even unthinkable. Children's literature began when adults started to believe that needed to be kept from certain kinds of knowledge--to know less. Since then, childhood has been primarily understood as a matter of being less: less knowledgeable, less experienced, less reasonable, less responsible, less capable--and certainly, less sexual. As a result of this focus on childhood as lacking, children's literature is centrally a literature that lacks. It characteristically lacks darkness, violence, moral ambiguity, big words, hard ideas. Most of all, it lacks sex. Sex is what innocence is most essentially innocent about. Children's literature pornographic? Yeah, sure, and there really were weapons of mass destruction. The unquestioning certainty with which most people connect children's literature with asexuality becomes obvious on occasions when specific texts challenge the connection. Back in the nineteen-seventies, some librarians were reported to be so offended by Maurice Sendak's depiction in his picture book In The Night Kitchen of young Mickey's full frontal nudity, truimphantly displayed as he shouts Cock a doodle doo (emphasis mine), that they covered the offending bits with felt marker diapers, lest the sight of a penis shock and distress young viewers as much as they themselves seemed to be shocked (Huck 42). More recently, I read another picture book, Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland's King and Kin to a University of Winnipeg class of children's literature students. The book describes how a queen's efforts to find a suitable princess for her son to marry fail, until one of the candidates shows up on the arm of her brother, the prince immediately falls in love, and the two princes marry and become king and king. Many of my students were shocked that a children's picture book was acknowledging the possibility of homosexual marriage, because, some said, the audience the book was clearly intended for was too young to need to know about sex. The diaper-drawing librarians' response to Sendak's pictorial acknowledgment that boys actually have penises and my students' response to the fictional representation of young males feeling physically attracted to each other are much like the way the Criminal Code understands pornography--any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex (16318]). …

Starboy and I

I know people have the right to fictionalize in all sorts of ways about the future-for instance, by the year 2010 we can vacation on the moon or hold a wedding on Mars. These scenarios might only be extrapolations, but we can write them into books as if they were facts. However, the past is more popular for fabrication, at least in China, where there's an endless stream of novels and TV series featuring romances and intrigues set in imperial palaces. The closest thing to this in America would be westerncowboy fiction. Clearly, the length of a country's history makes a difference. China has a vast amount of history that can be fictionalized, while America has only a couple of hundred years, and most of that is documented in detail. Documentation gets to be pretty important when you remember how many versions of history China has had during those same couple of hundred years. These different versions have given Chinese writers more leeway to fictionalize. So a foreigner who observes Chinese history from the outside must feel bewildered. And not just foreigners: even Chinese people feel distanced from their history. For one simple reason: a lot of history is treated vaguely, with big words covering a great many details, and when you lose the details, the fascination of history is gone. I'm not attempting to write a serious, in-depth analysis. I'm just writing about a friend of mine, about his background and his talent for fabrication, which I greatly appreciate. His name is Starboy. I'm told that three days after his father's wedding, in 1949, someone gave his father a boat ticket to Hong Kong. Because he couldn't find a second ticket, he gave up on Hong Kong and stayed on the mainland, where he and his wife raised three children, including Starboy. After the Cultural Revolution, the common fiction in China was expressed this way: "If my grandfather (or parents or whoever) had left the mainland in 1949, it would have been a different story." From there, switch to Shanghai in 1981, when Starboy was thirty-one years old. By then I had known him for more than ten years, but never once had I heard him fictionalize his parents like that. He made up a different story: "I just pretend my father returned from Hong Kong to the motherland in 1950." That's the way he is-someone who thinks like a writer

Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics

Preface. A Foreword in Three Acts. I: Images of Reality. 1. Biology of Perception. The representation of the world. We never see the same thing. A short skit. Decision against solipsism. 2. Facets of Truth. Truth means war. The hidden workings of nature. The ethical imperative. Loss of the archimedic point. The metaphor of the dance. 3. The Danger of the Label. Skeptical remarks on Constructivism. An attempt to get around the big words. 4. Explaining the Explanation. Cause and effect. Laws of people and laws of nature. Why Socrates had to die. Trivial and nontrivial machines. The interaction of nontrivial machines. II: Perspectives in Practice. 1. Teaching. The pupil as a nontrivial machine. Tests test tests. From teacher to researcher. Outline of an experiment. 2. Psychotherapy. The distinction between sickness and health. Generating a new eigenbehavior. Learning to see white mice. 3. Management. Thus spake the hierarchy. Thinking heterarchically. The Battle of Midway. Principles of self-organization. 4. Communication. The world contains no information. Hermeneutics of the listener. Realities of the media. III: Cybernetics. The Fundamental Principle: Circularity. People and Machines. The Computer Metaphor of the Mind. Cybernetics of Cybernetics. We Do not See that We Do not See. All Cretans Lie. IV: Biographical Excursions. 1. Childhood and Youth. The world of Vienna. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Experiences of a magician. 2. The Second World War and the Post-war Period. Survival in Berlin, the capital of the Reich. As Dr. Heinrich on the radio. Collective guilt or individual responsibility. 3. A Jump to another World: America. Theory of memory. Beginnings of Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences. The Biological Computer Laboratory. V: Knowledge and Ethics. Ethics is not a Theory. Decidable and Undecidable Questions. Responsibility for the World. About the Authors.

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (review)

Modernism, nationalism, and the novel: those big words that make us so unhappy. As critics and literary historians, we cannot do without them, yet there is so little agreement about what we should be doing with them. They are such blunt tools to cut with. In his concise and often illuminating book, Pericles Lewis confidently shoulders the task of trying to bring these three unwieldy terms into relation with one another, of showing how the Novel (or rather, a few particular novels) written under the aegis of Modernism (or of a few of its instantiations) both responded to and helped shape (some of) the discourses of Nationalism in the early twentieth century.

Learning Science Involves Language, Experience, and Modeling

As we consider science learning, we must ask a fundamental question: What is science? The varying answers to this question traditionally have contributed to the gulf between physical science on the one hand and education and cognitive science on the other. Dialogue among practitioners must always make clear what we consider science to be. A catalogue of facts and a litany of big words usually define science instruction. But science is not a compendium of facts and big words. Science is a process for answering questions about nature. This paper presents learning science as involving three components, language, experience, and models, and discusses how information technology has an important role in each component.

THE MULTISYLLABIC WORD DILEMMA: HELPING STUDENTS BUILD MEANING, SPELL, AND READ “BIG” WORDS

Facility with multisyllabic words is essential for students as they read, write, and learn. Many big words occur infrequently, but when they do occur they carry much of the meaning and content of what is being read. English is a language in which many words are related through their morphology. This relationship is preserved through our spelling system. Students who learn to look for patterns in multisyllabic words will be better spellers and decoders. If they learn to look further and consider possible meaning relationships, they will increase the size of their meaning vocabulary stores. This article summarizes research and presents practical teaching strategies for developing facility with multisyllabic words.

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor "How do you do it?" Mr. Max Wilhite's letter of March, 1997, (ASL to English Literacy. (142)1, 5.) raises important questions about the ASL to English literacy issue, one that has interested me since I was a reading teacher at the Maryland School for the deaf. My students, though proficient in ASL, had difficulty reading and writing English and I felt as frustrated as Mr. Wilhite. Now that I'm a teacher-educator, I find myself turning to deaf students in our graduate programs and asking, "How do you do it?" These students have learned English to get through undergraduate and graduate school successfully. I asked them to address Mr. Wilhite's concerns (Mr. Wilhite's questions appear in italics.) How would ASL help my son in college while he studied Organic Medicinal Chemistry. My point being, what is the sign for "organic, " "medicinal, " or for "chemistry"? One doctoral student (fifth generation deaf) says he learns new vocabulary through fingerspelling. English words that do not have sign language equivalents can be fingerspelled, then explained using familiar signs the child knows. Another deaf graduate student (also from a deaf family) says that even hearing children have difficulty with big words and need someone to explain in words the child knows. A deaf colleague of mine who earned a B.S. in Chemistry at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf offers another solution. He says in class the interpreter and the deaf student "negotiate" on a sign to use for that particular scientific word. First the word is fingerspelled, a sign is agreed upon, then for the remainder of the semester that particular sign is used. I asked a panel of deaf adults how they learned words like "plethora, " "minuscule , " "oblivious, " and "tenuous. " As with the chemistry words above, deaf graduate students suggest that the teacher or parent use both fingerspelling and a simple explanation of the word. Another student, a CODA (hearing child of deaf parents) says that teachers can use classifiers to explain words like "plethora" and "minuscule ." A deaf doctoral student in a psycholinguistics seminar added that parents mistakenly believe there must be a one-to-one correspondence between every manual sign and print word. In any language translation, meanings are translated, not individual words. Sometimes you have one sign for several English words and vice versa. And just because a deaf child knows an initialized sign for a word, it does not necessarily mean the child will understand that word, says one hearing doctoral student, a 20-year veteran reading teacher of deaf children . She concurs with her deaf classmates that the child needs an explanation of the word in signs he or she already knows. Another deaf graduate student says he learns advanced vocabulary through context clues. Other deaf students say their parents encouraged early reading, took them to the library regularly, and modeled reading at home. Last fall my son was due for his 3-year assessment... He was deficient in verb conjugation, pronouns, naming body parts, articles, "to be" verbs, and contractions . None of these exist in ASL. Several deaf graduate students point out that while ASL grammar is different from English grammar, it does express verb tenses, pronouns, and articles using its own lexicon and syntax (Valli & Lucas, 1995). Further, the concept "to be" and contractions can be expressed in other ways in ASL. Also, both the parent and teacher must learn the grammar of both languages to explain them to the deaf child. One deaf graduate student suggests that parents and teachers be taught ASL grammar by certified teachers who are knowledgeable about ASL linguistics. He says that hearing people taking classes in ASL can be misinformed by teachers who only have superficial knowledge of ASL. He also points out that it's important for parents to know about Deaf culture. ASL grammar won't allow me to label the names of cars on my street, the food in my refrigerator, or the names of trees in my yard... to differentiate between old and elderly.... As in the science words above, the deaf graduate students advise parents and teachers to use fingerspelling followed by explanations in signs...

Heavy traffic

Heavy Traffic Denis Dutton It was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come. These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today. But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In...