TeachingWhat is a homonym/ homophone/homograph? G is a ninth-grade francophone student I tutored in YMCA. She was scratching her head because of the English homework when I came to her. The teacher asked G to revise the first part of her composition and to go on finishing the rest of the detective story. G told me that both the teacher and her mother, who is another English teacher, commented that her story doesn't make sense. We are not going to go over how I posited myself back to an age full of imagination and came up with some plausible scenarios to force the bad guys to be clumsy enough to leave some clues for the police. The constant misuse of homophones in her passage caught my eye. There is no difficulty for G to express herself orally, partly because she was born and raised in the states until she was eight. However, when it comes to writing tasks, she has trouble in lexical selection from time to time, especially the frequently encountered homographs. In G's composition, "She found TOO bracelets on the ground." contains a homophone of "two" which she intended to use in the beginning. This is not the only misused pair of homophones appeared in her passage. Typical examples like "by" and "buy" can also be found. I don't think the problem lies in G's overall English level. In contrast, there might be something peculiar about the homonym.
Then I looked up some materials about homonyms. Jared et al (2016) carried out three experiments to examine the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. They used the homophone error paradigm, which assumes that if readers activate the meanings of words using phonology, then homophone errors should be harder to detect than spelling control errors. When homophone errors are embedded in contexts of sentences or stories, both good and poor readers detect less homophone errors than spelling control errors. These three experiments provide clear evidence that phonology makes an important contribution to the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 readers. I also found an interesting effect named homophone effect. Homophone effect mainly refers to that a person need more lexical decision time compared to non-homophones. The homophone effect has been attributed to orthographic competition created by feedback from phonology. In addition, they suggest that homophone effects could not be diminished(Pexman et al., 2001). More recently, Newman (2011) discussed the the homophone effects during visual word recognition among children in greater detail. She conducted some experiments with a group of children aging between 7 and 13, leading them to participate in a lexical decision task in which lexical frequency and homophony were manipulated. The study found that homophony has a significant impact on children’s lexical decision times and brain activation patterns and that this effect was modulated by age. Since the significance of the homophone effects is revealed and there are surely quite a few students having trouble telling the homophones from each other, we need to think about what teachers can do to help solve the problem. I happened to come across an exercise on the other day. Student C had an exercise requiring him to use pairs of homographs to make up a sentence. The exercise includes "lead(n.) & lead(v.)", "tear(n.) & tear(v.)", "flour & flower" and "soar & sore". Such exercise raises students' awareness about the existence of homonyms though they don't know there is such a word called homonym, but how aware they can be when the words are put back into contexts remains unknown. On the other hand, such exercise poses to be a good opportunity to push the student to resort to the dictionary because there is no illustrative pictures or anything about the meaning. The teacher or the instruction should have clearly told the students that they should look the words up if they don't understand. Student C didn't know what "soar" means and he didn't have a dictionary with him. I explained two meanings of "soar" to C: The price of a bottle of juice goes up from $1 to $100; An eagle swoops down on a rabbit, and then? (with my hand gesturing flying up to the sky). At last we decided to use the latter meaning of soar here for the sake of easiness. Casenhiser's research clearly demonstrates children's dispreference in learning a different, unrelated meaning for a known word when that word is used in a linguistic context that fails to bias strongly for a new meaning. If language language exists for communication, it is possible that sound and meaning will evolve to form a one-to-one correspondence for the sake of avoiding ambiguity. Anyway, let's see! References: Casenhiser, D. M. (May 14, 2005). Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms. Journal of Child Language, 32, 2, 319-343. Choose your words: Homonym, Homophone, Homograph. Retrieved from: https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-homophone- homograph/; "homograph". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: from http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homograph; "homonym". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homonym; "homophone". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homophone; Jared, D., Ashby, J., Agauas, S. J., & Levy, B. A. (January 01, 2016). Phonological activation of word meanings in grade 5 readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 4, 524-41. Newman, S. D. (January 01, 2012). The homophone effect during visual word recognition in children: an fMRI study. Psychological Research, 76, 3, 280-91. Pexman, P. M., Lupker, S. J., & Jared, D. (January 01, 2001). Homophone effects in lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1, 139-56.
1 Comment
Mela Sarkar
12/13/2016 05:24:53 pm
Trying to understand homophones and homonyms makes my head sore...and reading this blog makes my heart soar!
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