Assesing Language

We mainly talked about the assessment of language in today's class. The main thing that we talked about was the actual assessment of language. When a teacher is assessing a student you must make sure that you are using an assessment that has been tested in many different norms and has yielded positive results in the tests it has already administered. We looked at an assessment in class in our groups and we saw just how difficult it can be to make a positive assessment and how good they can be. My group got a great assessment. These were the questions that my group had and I think that they were great questions!1. How do you deal with the challenges of young kids and assessing them for language disorders? (some kids just don't talk and have no language problems at all, or sometimes they just develop a tad slower but catch on)2. How do you handle an assessment for a child who is an ELL?3. What ways can you as a teacher enhance language skills in the classroom? 

School Age Language

The main thing we talked about this week was the development of school age language.
These were the 6 things in Morphology and Syntax Development in School Age children!
 1. Inflectional prefixes ( un- and dis-)
2. Derivational suffixes :  word endings that
change the meaning of the words ( -ly)
3. Reflexives:  ( myself / himself)
4. Verb Tense:  ( have, be, has, had)
5. Continue to develop  advance sentence types
6. Development can be observed in their
writing

We also learned that the 2 main predictors for reading success are Language skills, Phonological ability.
This bit of learning seemed to really stick in my mind because of the practicality of it. I thought that the part of the lesson on how to monitor students was the most important. It said that if you need to see how a child interacts with language you should also look at their social interaction as well.

Language Acquisition and Models

This week we learned about the acquisiton of language. Respiration, Phonation, Resonation, Articulation are all the four processes of speech and are needed to produce speech. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=C2lRhe_Fc04&feature=related this is a very cool video we watched in class about how speech is produced. I thought that it was interesting to say the least. We also learned about the areas of the brain. Broca's area, Wernicke's area, Corpus Callusum, Midbrain.
I also liked the funs stuff we did in our groups, nothing stood out this week that I felt I had to write about, but it was still fun all the same.

Language: Disorders and Elements

There are 5 elements of language; Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Together they are all working to create language. Language is thoughts and ideas and what we are expressing. The definition of communication is Sender, Receiver, Shared Intent, Shared Means, Definition of Speech, Definition of Language. Communication is how a person actually does this, by using language to share ideas and thoughts. I thought that the Major brain region diagram review was a very useful activity that my group came up with.It is a print out of the brain will be presented. Over each major area is a colored sticky note. The students must compete with one another and guess what each part is. When the guess is made the sticky note is pulled off and the answer is revealed. I thought that overall my group had some great ideas and discussions this week and that this week's class was amazing.