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Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Well researched, well written - a delight for the reader!


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Although there are many delightful examples of word research in this book, one can only wish that there were more. No doubt that was the author's plan -- to encourage readers to do some research on their own. There are numerous helpful references to help such readers get started. A great many books have been published over the past fifty years alone on the origin and meaning of various unusual English words, phrases, and idioms. I know, because I've read probably most of them. Knowles has a long history of involvement with Oxford's dictionary-publishing tradition and what she attempts here is not another collection of anecdotal mini-histories but a systematic discussion of how one properly investigates word origins and usages.

In the early days of the OED and its successor publications, this meant paging patiently through books and newspapers and journals, hunting for examples -- and that, in fact, was Knowles's first job. Nowadays, though, the publication of so many full-text sources on the Internet makes the search much more efficient and potentially more complete. Unfortunately, Knowles doesn't seem to quite know how to go about explaining what she so obviously knows. The chapter on types of dictionaries, what they're actually for, and how to read an entry, wavers between providing unnecessary details on the obvious to saying nothing at all about the not-so-obvious.

I reread the "Understanding What We Have Found" a couple of times and still didn't find much about interpretation -- just a few more anecdotes.

How to Read a Word

And throughout, she skips from one subject to another and back again, making it difficult to keep track of anything. The author has missed the opportunity to take popular interest in lexicography such as it is in a new, more organized direction. One person found this helpful. Though the title seems presumptuous, I was excited to hear of this book by a lexicographer from the staff at Oxford. I expected myriad allusions to the OED Oxford English Dictionary as the holy grail of etymology - and there were quite a few - but they were reasonably placed.

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Due credit was accorded to Dictionary. Most of the text explains how to research an interesting word or expression using, of course, the OED and the Oxford corpus. I found most of these chapters redundant and slightly boring. Anyone who has used google for research is familiar with the basics listed here, so being told repeatedly how to do a keyword search can get a bit tedious.

It's word origins , but the author is most likely hoping to reach a broader audience. I enjoyed the vivid word examples and origin histories provided. I almost wish there were more. For example, the increasing validity of the word "nucular" proves that typos and mispronunciations, however moronic, turn into accepted words eventually of which apparently I too am guilty, as my use of "typo" indicates. Researching "blue moon" revealed some insights into astrology and folklore. The appendices were most helpful, from "Pathways to English" highlighting the eras and dates of derivative languages, to "Dictionary History.

My suggestion to readers is to begin with the glossary, then read the appendix, then the text. See all 4 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. How to Read a Word. Set up a giveaway. Pages with related products. See and discover other items: There's a problem loading this menu right now.

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How to Read a Word

Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Phonics is simply decoding instruction--teaching beginners to understand spellings as phoneme maps. However, because phonemes are coarticulated, phoneme awareness must usually be taught explicitly, not just assumed.

We're used to thinking of two routes to word recognition: However, all skilled readers acquire sight words, and all are expert decoders. Moreover, we can recognize words by analogizing, stringing together pronounceable word parts, or contextual guessing. Sight recognition means instant recognition without analysis. Decoding involves translation; although early decoding requires audible sounding out and blending, later decoding is fast and silent. To analogize, we recall a word with the same spelling pattern and make the unfamiliar word rhyme with the remembered word. The pronounceable word parts strategy requires a large store of sight chunks, such as ing , ight , and tion , that readers can string together to identify words.

Contextual guessing is using the rest of the sentence to guess unrecognized words. Because guesswork is slow, effortful, and not very reliable, readers rapidly abandon it as they gain decoding skill and sight vocabulary. The problem in reading words is to access the lexicon, i. Before we ever learn to read, we store an incredible web of words with their pronunciations, meanings, syntax, and sometimes spelling data. The problem in reading is to access the lexicon, i. Access routes of skilled readers are memorable they can call up a word easily , reliable they get the same word every time they see its spelling , and easily learned in just a few trials.

But accurate, reliable access routes are not good enough: To save resources for comprehension, we need effortless access to words. Thus sight word access is the goal of phonics instruction. Children don't just jump into decoding and acquiring sight vocabulary. They move through predictable phases of using the alphabet more and more skillfully.

Before children learn to use the alphabet, they employ a default strategy of attaching a visual cue to meaning. This visual cue strategy explains why very young children can recognize many words in their normal surroundings, for example, reading McDonald's with the arches logo.

They are simply recognizing pictures. When children gain alphabetic insight, they begin to use phonetic cues instead of visual cues. They use some letters usually at the beginning of a word to cue some of the phonemes in the word, providing a systematic access route to the word in the lexicon though not a reliable route. Reliable access comes in the alphabetic phase, when children learn to decode words from spelling alone. Alphabetic phase reading allows children to rapidly acquire sight vocabulary. Contrary to past beliefs, sight-word learning does not depend on rote association.

Children learn sight words in just a few quality encounters.

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Quality encounters connect letters in a spelling to phonemes in the pronunciation, usually by sounding out and blending. In other words, we typically learn sight words through careful decoding. Though decoding demands great attention in young readers, it sets up reliable access routes to retrieve the word. Once the access route is established, the tools to build it correspondence rules drop out. The spelling becomes a meaningful symbol of spoken word i. Learning to decode dramatically reduces the number of trials to sight recognition from an average of 35 trials to an average of 4 trials.

How do we lead children to the full alphabetic phase where they can sound out words? Phonics is designed to accomplish this goal. Phonics is simply instruction in decoding.