Syllabus Template

Course name: Language Essentials for Teachers (3 credit hours)
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COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course is designed to teach preprofessional and practicing teachers and therapists the fundamental principles and concepts of the structure of the English language. Participants will be able to explain the speech-to-print correspondence system, the aspects of language represented by print, and the ways that meanings are conveyed by words and sentences. Students will learn the speech sounds of English and how the spelling system works. Further, they will understand morphology (the meaningful parts of words), sentence structure (syntax), and ways that word relationships contribute to text cohesion. The application of language concepts to explicit instruction will be described and modeled throughout the course. Students are expected to complete many short exercises in the textbook and workbook as they master this content.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

1. Understand the language processing requirements of word reading and fluent passage reading with comprehension.
2. Identify the subsystems of language and their interrelationships.
3. Summarize the findings of major scientific consensus reports on the phases of learning to read and write and the nature of skilled reading.
4. Using student work samples, interpret differences between good and poor readers in language use and language proficiency, both oral and written.
5. Understand, produce, and memorize the vowel and consonant speech sounds of English, for the purpose of recognizing phonological confusions, selecting examples during instruction, and designing activities for student learning.
6. Learn the most common vowel and consonant graphemes that represent English phonemes, and the position constraints or patterns that govern their use in orthography.
7. Distinguish syllables from morphemes in speech and print, decompose morphologically complex words into their structural elements, and become familiar with a general progression for morphological awareness instruction.
8. Understand the relationship between sentence meaning and sentence structure, and review ways to explicitly teach how sentences work.
9. Understand the concept of deep lexical quality in word learning, and the many ways that word relationships can be emphasized in vocabulary instruction.
10. Identify the linguistic devices that connect phrases and clauses within sentences and between sentences, and how they can be taught to support comprehension.

Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, Third Edition by Louisa Cook Moats. Copyright © 2020 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

REQUIRED TEXTS

1. Textbook (STP)
   Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers (3rd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

2. Workbook
   Moats, L. C., & Rosow, B. L. (2020). Speech to print: Language exercises for teachers (3rd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Read the text before a class on that topic. Read any other assigned articles posted on the course website.
2. Complete the assigned in-text exercises.
3. Complete the assigned workbook exercises.
4. Complete any additional practice exercises or case studies assigned from the online supplementary materials.
5. Complete an in-person check on phoneme production and phoneme awareness.
6. Complete the chapter quizzes and final exam.

ATTENDANCE EXPECTATIONS

Attendance is taken during the first 10 minutes of class. If you miss __ classes, failure of the course is automatic.

GRADING [EXAMPLE]

Chapter 2, Phonetics, Session 1: The Elusive Phoneme

Reading: STP Chapter 1
Workbook: Exercises 1–4

Chapter 2, Phonetics, Session 2: English Consonants

Consonants and their distinctive features; place and manner of articulation; consonant spelling errors as indicators of phoneme confusions.
Reading: STP Chapter 2
Workbook: Exercises 5–10

Chapter 2, Phonetics, Session 3: Vowel Phonemes in English

18 vowel phonemes plus schwa, by order of articulation—front to back, high to low; tense/lax distinction; vowel + r combinations; minimal pairs; schwa; phonetic transcription; other languages’ vowel systems; and principles of instruction.
Reading: STP Chapter 2
Workbook: Exercises 11–20

Chapter 3, Phonology, Session 1: How Sounds Are Combined to Form Words and Syllables

Phonological systems—how speech sounds are sequenced and combined to form words. The internal structure of spoken syllables; syllable boundaries; maximal onset rule; phonotactics; simple and complex syllables; teaching syllable awareness.
Reading: STP Chapter 3
Workbook: Exercises 2–26

Chapter 3, Phonology, Session 2: Aspects of Phonological Processing

Phonological sensitivity; speech codes in memory; working memory, retrieval, and rapid naming.
Reading: STP Chapter 3
Workbook: Exercise 27

Chapter 3, Phonology, Session 3: Phonological and Phoneme Awareness

Progression of phoneme awareness development and phoneme proficiency; diagnostic assessment of PA; minimal pairs; spelling error analysis.
Reading: STP Chapter 3
Workbook: Exercises 28–30

Chapter 3, Phonology, Session 4: Allophonic Variation in Speech Sound Production

Systematic variation, coarticulation; vowel reduction; nasal deletion; affrication; flapping; deaspiration; vowel modifications; spelling analysis.
Reading: STP Chapter 3
Workbook: Exercises 31–37

Chapter 3, Phonology, Session 5: Teaching Phonological Skills

General principles of instruction by level of development of phoneme awareness. Role play, video, and case studies.

Chapter 4, Orthography, Session 1: The Nature of the English Writing System

History of writing systems; history of English; sound and meaning represented in the writing system; orthographic memory.
Reading: STP Chapter 4
Workbook: Exercises 38–40

Chapter 4, Orthography, Session 2: Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences in English

Types of graphemes; most frequent spellings for sounds; position-based spellings; constraints on letter use in the spelling system. Consonant and vowel graphemes.
Reading: STP Chapter 4
Workbook: Exercises 41–46

Chapter 4, Orthography, Session 3: Syllable Types, Big Words, and Ending Rules

Syllable juncture and written syllable division; accent shift and schwa. Suffix addition and its effect on spelling; the doubling, drop-e, and y rules. Big word reading strategy. How regular is the English spelling system?
Reading: STP Chapter 4
Workbook: Exercises 47–52

Chapter 5, Morphology, Session 1: Role of Morphology in Learning to Read and Write

Definitions; morpheme classes; introduction to etymological influences on English morphology. Morphemes by language of origin; inflectional morphology.
Reading: STP Chapter 5
Workbook: Self-assessment, Exercise 53–61

Chapter 5, Morphology, Session 2: Derivational Complexity

Derivational suffixes; accent shift patterns; phonological and orthographic changes in derived words; the i-connector.
Reading: STP Chapter 5
Workbook: Exercises 62–66

Chapter 5, Morphology, Session 3: Instruction and Assessment

Development of morphological knowledge; assessing and teaching morphology. Helping English language learners; principles of instruction—transparency, generativity, complexity; primary and intermediate levels, instructional techniques. Summary overview of a word study curriculum.
Reading: STP Chapter 5
Workbook: Exercises 67–68 Final chapter quiz

Chapter 6, Syntax, Session 1: Introduction to the Study of Syntax

Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar; phrase structure and argument structure in written text; nature of academic language; evidence of mental grammar.
Reading: STP Chapter 6
Workbook: Pretest, Exercises 70–74

Chapter 6, Syntax, Session 2: Phrase and Argument Structure

Basic sentence structure and inverted tree diagrams; parts of speech and syntactic categories; argument structure and semantic roles. The anatomy and behavior of a phrase; ambiguity and sentence parsing; the power of the verb in requiring role fulfillment.
Reading: STP Chapter 6
Workbook: Exercises 75–81

Chapter 6, Syntax, Session 3: How Sentences Hang Together

Clause (independent, dependent) types; hierarchical sentence trees; conjunctions; how sentences hang together; transformations; assessment and instructional strategies.

Chapter 7, Semantics, Session 1: Word Meanings (Lexical Semantics)

Knowing a word well—the lexical quality hypothesis; sentence or sentential semantics; context or pragmatics; on what does comprehension of meaning depend? The mental dictionary (lexicon) and how it is organized.
Reading: STP Chapter 7
Workbook: Exercises 88–99

Chapter 7, Semantics, Session 2: Vocabulary Instruction

Exploring word relationships, including categories, associations, multiple meanings, synonyms, antonyms, shared semantic features. Phrase meanings; figurative language; principles and practices of vocabulary instruction.
Reading: STP Chapter 7
Workbook: Exercises 100–103

Chapter 7, Semantics, Session 3: Phrase and Sentence Meaning (Sentential Semantics); Teaching How Text Hangs Together

Truth value of sentences; local comprehension of sentences and intersentence connections; noun and verb phrases, and the importance of the verb, revisited. Reference, substitution, conjunctions and connectors, or signal words; pragmatics; recommendations for teaching comprehension of text at the integrative level.
Reading: STP Chapter 7
Workbook: Exercises 104–109; chapter quiz

Chapter 8, Summary Review and Wrap-Up

Structured literacy approaches and explicit teaching of language. Case studies.
Reading: STP Chapter 8
Final exam