Context: In Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, Louisa Moats identifies five universal components of language – phonological skills, syntax, morphological skills, pragmatics, and semantics or vocabulary.
Let’s unpack each component in greater detail:
Oral language is composed of two components:
Phonology: Phonology is the study of the speech sound (i.e., phoneme) system of a language, including the rules for combining and using phonemes.
In terms of oral language, this means:
Morphology: Morphology is the study of the rules that govern how morphemes, the minimal meaningful units of language, are used in a language.
English is a morphophonemic language, which means that the English spelling system represents sounds, syllables, and morphemes. Morphemes are the smaller units of meaning within words, and they include two separate classes: bases (or roots) and affixes, including prefixes and suffixes. (SEA, n.d.)
| Prefixes | Bases (or Roots) | Suffixes |
|---|---|---|
| A prefix is a group of letters placed before the root of a word. For example, the prefix re- means back or again, as in reappear and react. | A base is a morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning. For example, happy is the base in the words happiness, unhappy, and unhappiness. | A suffix is a group of letters placed after the root of a word. For example, the suffix -ful means full of, as in beautiful and grateful. |
In terms of oral language, this means:
Reference: “What Are Morphemes?” SEA - Supporting English Acquisition, https://www.rit.edu/ntid/sea/processes/wordknowledge/grammatical/whatare
Syntax: Syntax is the study of the rules that pertain to the ways in which words can be combined to form sentences in a language. Knowledge of syntax includes knowledge of the parts of speech, phrases, clauses, and sentence types.
In terms of oral language, this means:
Semantics: Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and word combinations in a language system.
Semantic processing is critical to reading comprehension and written expression; in order to understand language, students need to understand the meaning represented by the specific vocabulary words, phrases, and figurative language they encounter.
In terms of oral language, this means:
Pragmatics: Pragmatics is the study of the rules associated with the use of language in conversation and broader social situations.
Pragmatics skills can be nonlinguistic (e.g., eye contact, proximity, turn taking) or linguistic (e.g., conversations), and effective communication is dependent upon understanding and using pragmatic rules in context. Children who have developed strong pragmatic skills are able to combine phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax to achieve effective communication.
In terms of oral language, this means:
These five language domains are part of a continuum that builds toward higher order language skills, including:
Metalinguistic awareness is "the ability to think about and reflect upon language" (Gillon, 2004, p. 10) or "the ability to objectify language and dissect it as an arbitrary linguistic code independent of meaning" (Roth, Speece, Cooper, & de la Paz, 1996, p. 258).
In other words, metalinguistic awareness is the ability to think consciously about language as a code and manipulate it accordingly. This awareness is critical for language alternation between dialects as well as translation between languages — an idea we’ll explore in greater depth in the next section.
References:
“Language In Brief.” American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/spoken-language-disorders/language-in-brief/
Zipke, Marcy. “Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension with Riddles.” Reading Rockets, 24 Aug. 2017, www.readingrockets.org/article/teaching-metalinguistic-awareness-and-reading-comprehension-riddles
