Without understanding the "referential function" of language (words as "verbal labels," symbolizing other things), it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present ...

Language isn’t just about words—it’s about how we produce sounds, how those sounds are organized, and how we interpret them in context. Phonetics studies the physical creation and perception of sounds ...

Phonics helps teach children how to merge separate sounds together to make it one word. from www.shutterstock.com The efficacy of phonics as a method of teaching has been debated for several decades, ...

Editor's note: With low reading proficiency scores across the state, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin is exploring the causes and consequences of low literacy. This article is part of the By the Book ...

It started as a routine phonics lesson in the 1st grade Bronx classroom I was observing to study how students learn to read. The objective was to learn the igh spelling pattern. The list of words was ...

My post doc after finishing my degree in 1984 was teaching first grade at the bilingual elementary where I had done dissertation research. As I headed out into the real world, a widely admired ...

Arguments about the best way to teach children to read can be intense – they’ve even been described as “the reading wars”. In England, as in many other countries, much of the debate has been over the ...

(Credit: Petr Vaclavek/Shutterstock) In English we say "nose", the French say "nez" and Germans pronounce it "nase." The words that different cultures use to describe the same objects or concepts ...

The word "apple", as we pronounce it, is a sequence of sounds (phonemes) that we use whenever we want to refer to the object it indicates. If we did not know that a referential relationship exists ...