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TELL Road Map

Alphabet

The alphabet comprises the first several lessons, providing students with a basic understanding of the letters and sounds that make-up the English language. Aside from learning how to say each of the letters, students must also learn the individual sounds that combine to form the letter names. For example, the name of letter ‘B' has two sounds, /b/ and /i/, forming /bi/. In this process, students also learn that there are long sounds /i/, or vowel sounds, and short sounds /b/, consonant sounds. This helps students distinguish individual sounds and teach them to focus in and articulate each sound correctly. Students are also taught to distinguish the sounds of letter names and how letters sound in words. For example, although the letter name for ‘B' is /bi/, the letter ‘B' sounds /b/ in a word, as in ball

. This covers the sound track.

For the script track, students are taught to read and write all upper case and lower case letters, as well as their phonetic symbols.

Phonetics

One might wonder why we teach students the phonetic symbols when they can just learn to naturally sound out words according to their spelling. We teach phonetics because many letters or letter combinations have sounds that sound very similar, but are actually quite different. For instance, the letter combination ‘th' have two different sounds that can seem quite similar, as in

‘three' and

‘these'.

Teaching phonetics not only help students differentiate the various sounds, but also trains students to articulate them. Here, we can already see the interconnectedness of these different topics. While teaching the alphabet, we have already touched upon phonetics.

Phonics

Now that students have fundamental understanding of all the letters in the alphabet and their various sounds in words, we teach students the common rules of spelling and help them recognize exceptions. By teaching them the rules and exceptions, we can avoid the common but problematic practice of memorization. The rules are reliable and can be applied to thousands of situations, so they can be used as a “shortcut” or a “trick” to help students have an easier time learning the language.

There are simple and commonly taught rules such as when two vowels are placed together, the first vowel makes a long sound and the second vowel is silent, as in the word ‘sail' . There are also less well-known rules such as in order to maintain the first vowel's short sound, the consonant that follows must be doubled, as in the word ‘latter' . If the consonant is not doubled, it would be ‘later' . These rules are easy to follow, and students will quickly learn to pronounce words they see written (decoding) and write words they hear (encoding) without falling back on memorization.

Phonology/ Morphology

On the sound track is phonology, which teaches students how the sounds of a language are organized to form complete thoughts. After students understand how to articulate the individual sounds, we teach them how to combine the sounds to form words. Thus, individual sounds form to create syllables, and syllables form into words.

Also, English is a connected language, which means that the ending sound of one word often attaches itself to the beginning sound of the next word. For instance, if you say the phrase “an easy test” out loud, the ending ‘n' combines with the beginning /i/ sound of ‘easy', and you may hear something like the word “knees”. Learning syllabication and connected language techniques will help children speak more fluently and sound more like a native speaker.

On the script track is morphology, which is the study of word parts, such as word base, word root, prefixes, suffixes, and ending markings. When students understand how prefixes such as ‘un', ‘in', or ‘re' and suffixes such as ‘tion', ‘tive', or ‘ism' can change the meaning of a word, they can infer the meaning based on logic.

Lexicon

On the sound track we teach students the syllable stress in multi-syllabic words. For instance, in words that end with ‘ation', such as ‘information' or ‘conversation', the stress always falls on the letter ‘a'. This is extremely important to the comprehensibility of students' speaking.

In terms of script, students learn the meanings of words, their classifications within the eight parts of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc.), and how they are used. In addition, students will turn their focus to things like verb conjugation and tense changes. Students would have already been exposed to these changes early on simply through everyday classroom interactions.

Syntax

When speaking whole sentences students must also learn rhythm, tone and word-stress. This allows them to speak more fluently, as well as enables them to alter the whole meanings of sentences simply through the tones and inflections of their voices. For instance, if you said, “Her name is Sarah”, with the stress on ‘Sarah', it would indicate that you want to emphasize what her name is. However, if you said, “Her name is Sarah”, with the stress on ‘her', it would indicate that you want to emphasize whom, or which person is named Sarah.

On the script track, syntax teaches students to form whole phrases, clauses and sentences. Types of sentences, such as interrogative, imperative, etc., are enumerated, and grammar structure rules are covered in this step.

Thoughts

We can think of “thoughts” as the final objective. This is the ability to formulate complete thoughts and to express these thoughts clearly whether in speaking or writing. It is also the ability to understand thoughts expressed by others. It is at last, the ability to communicate desires, ideas, opinions, and knowledge successfully. Though this is the objective, it is certainly not the final step. It exists throughout from lesson one to lesson 179. Students learn to express themselves from the very beginning, even if it something as simple as, “May I use the bathroom?” It is something that gradually becomes more complex and more complete over time, to the point that students may be able to discuss the themes of a book they read for class. Ultimately, this is the goal, the ideal that we hope to achieve in every class, whether beginning or advanced; it is the successful communication of thoughts.

Sound Track and Script Track

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of teaching English on these two separate tracks. These two fundamental language carriers should be taught at the same time but by separate methods. The traditional method of teaching English is to teach them a set of vocabulary words, and they learn to hear, speak, read and write them all in the same lesson. This is a terrible mistake as some students' first English words are “Good morning” and “Hello”. It is correct to teach them how to say and listen to these words. However, if they are confronted with their written forms before they even know that ‘g' sounds /g/ in words and a double ‘o' sometimes sounds /U/, how could they possibly make the connection between sound and script? As a result, particularly Taiwanese students rely on memorization.

This method is not a natural way to learn a language, and it often takes emphasis away from sound, therefore resulting in mute English learners. A student should listen to thousands of words in his or her first year of English study, but we cannot expect them to know how to read and write them all, so these two tracks must be taught simultaneously but separately. A student's sound development and script development should each be allowed to grow freely and not be hindered by one or the other.

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