Paper presented at the BDA International Conference 2014, Guildford.

1. Investigating literacy teachers'
linguistic knowledge
Dominik Lukes, Dyslexia Action
Daniel Gooch, IoE

2. Outline

3. Linguistic underpinnings of
literacy
Teacher knowledge
Phonics vs phonology
ILearnRW needs

4. “Why do teachers need to
know about the Structure of
Language?”
Townend and Walker, 2006

5. “those who were most
comfortable with the course
content were those who
already had some
knowledge of language
structure.”

6. “Good teachers should be
made uncomfortable by their
first encounter with the
social and structural
complexity of language.“
Lukes, 2010

7. Which reading skills
do you teach most
often?

8. “Syllable division”
“Vowels”
“Understanding unfamiliar
words from context”
“Finding patterns in words”
“Dividing words into base
and suffixes”

9. How do you teach
syllables?

10. “Wooden letters”
“Cards - physically move things
around”
“Highlight things with pens”
“Marking consonants and vowels in
the text”
“How many beats are there in that
word”

11. “Cumulative small steps building
on each other”
“Play games, particularly when a
child is starting to struggle/get
bored”

12. What’s missing?

13. Pronunciation dictionary
Phonics vs linguistics
Corpus
Dialect variation

14. Syllable division
knowledge

15. hospital
SWW
hospitable
WSWW
Phonics hos / pit / al hos / pit / a / ble
CEPD hos / pi / tal hos / pit / a / ble
LDP hosp / it / al ho / spit / ab / le
Onset maximization
before phonotatic
constraints
ho / spi / tal ho / spi / ta / ble
Phonic vs. phonological needs for
syllable division

16. Phonic vs. phonological needs for
syllable division
kitten
SW
spelling
SW
Phonics kit / ten spel / ling
CEPD kitt / en spell / ing
LDP kitt / en spell / ing
Onset maximization
before phonotatic
constraints
ki / tten spe / lling

17. MRC Psycholinguistic Database

18. Teacher knowledge of
syllable division does not
match linguistic analysis or
needs of machine readable
representation

20. How do you tell the game where the
boundary is?

21. How do you tell a reader which syllables
are open?

22. How do you analyze text and find
instances of < ay > = / eɪ / as in day, way

23. balloon
2 syllables: bal[short, closed] loon [long, closed]
adding rule
noun, verb
b & l oo n 5 phonemes, 7 letters
stress loon
possible misspellings: baloon, balun, balloonning
possible confusions:
inflectional forms: balloons [noun, verb], ballooning [verb, noun],
ballooned [verb]
derivational forms: balloonist
example sentences
ways of teaching difficulties
Pedagogic knowledge: relative position in a learning programme
Linguistic awareness: frequency (typicality) and relevance to
individual student

24. iLearnRW Internal Dictionary

25. Teacher decision
tree

26. Conclusion

27. Much of teachers’
knowledge is implicit and
cannot be directly relied on
for expert advice outside the
classroom.

28. Teachers’ linguistic
knowledge has to be
represented through proxies
and interaction patterns
rather than algorithmically.

29. Teachers and non-teachers
would benefit from tools that
would support their access
to the analysis of language.