Talk:Sight word

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Linguistics: Applied Linguistics

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 August 2018 and 7 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Autumns310, Streme2, Churtado3.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:20, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

[untitled]

This article is written from an obvious bias towards sight word teaching and does not have supporting facts to back it up 64.253.166.252 (talk) 20:03, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I came to the article expecting a "controversy" section or some counter-argument toward this method, too. It does seem to be lacking in information all around, though. Killiondude (talk) 21:09, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed biased language from the article and added information to represent an alternate perspective on teaching sight words. Autumns310 (talk) 04:19, 30 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have also added new material to bring the article up to date with current thinking. John NH (talk) 17:22, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistic misconceptions

The article needs better-informed sources.

Grammar
"was" does not indicate existence. It is the past form of "is", which shows inclusion in a set, or the tense/aspect-carrier of a compound verb.

Bob is old. (Bob is a person among the set of old people.)

Bob is walking. ("is" shows present-progressive)

Bob was walking. ("was" shows past-progressive)

Phonetics
"was" and "has" do not (in natural, unrehearsed speech) end in a [z] sound. They end an [s]. The grapheme /z/ was apparently chosen long ago to indicate the extended vocalized length of the syllabic nucleus. Thus, the phonemic differential between "bus" and "buzz" resides in the "u", not the coda: [bʌs] vs [bʌ:s].

In fact, fully voiced final obstruents are uncommon in English, and classified as "marked" (= odd), linguistically, and this fact is poorly understood in practical situations, such as ESL, where for example students might be taught that "dogs" is pronounced "dogz" and "docks" "doks", and that's how you pronounce them in English to show the difference (to your listener). Likewise "bets" and "bedz", differentiating wagers from the things you sleep on.

If I might introduce a personal note, I had to go through this with a Taiwanese (linguistics) major whose English was very good, and who nevertheless confessed a certain resonance with the matter, as this had never been explicitly outlined to her before:

"Yeah, I don't know why they taught us that, I didn't hear any "z" sound ending those words, but that's what they told us."

The fact is that the mistake has resided in the corpus of canonical linguistics resources for so long, it almost has the status of settled knowledge ("... one wug... more than one wug, wugz..."). JohndanR (talk) 15:17, 10 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Forget

Bdnfn 2603:8000:BA01:59C5:8961:A57A:1450:E6D4 (talk) 00:12, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]