So this course focuses on English as a written system, but it's actually quite useful to think about broader written systems, to put English in context. And when we think about writing, it's essentially spoken language represented in a visual form. And we can represent language in two main ways. We can represent the sounds of the language or we can represent the meaning, or we can have a combination of both. So, English is what we call an alphabetic language. So it actually uses the sounds of words as the visual symbols that it uses as in this example here. And so each of these letters in the word 'bat', we can also call a grapheme so this is a symbol, a visual symbol that is used to represent part of a language. So, in the English alphabetic system, what we call the small units of sound, are phonemes; these are the smallest units of sound that a language can use. And so... there's quite a lot of alphabetic languages that use phoneme-sized units to represent words and here are few examples on this slide. And as you can see from this slide, many languages derived from Greek and Latin, use this alphabetic system, but also languages like Hebrew. And also Cyrillic languages are based on alphabetic scripts even if the script isn't so familiar to the user of something like English. So we have this set of languages. We also have languages that don't use such a small unit of sound to represented ... represented as (a) visual symbol. So, for example, modern Yi, which is a Chinese language actually uses syllable-sized sounds. to be represented visually, as you'll see in this example here. And then we have a set of languages ... where there is very little sound represented in the visual systems. And so we call these logographic languages. And many Chinese dialects are actually the ... most widely known logographic languages. So for example, Mandarin. And so here, although there is some sound information included in the visual characters, they're actually much more using meaning as a way of transmitting information. So, here in this slide, we have an example of the word, the character for the word: 'book'. And then we also have the character for the word 'library'. And so you can see a library is obviously a store of books. And ... in the characters, you can see that shared meaning, by a replication of the same symbol. Whereas if you look at the English word, 'book', and library, these have no visual similarity to each other. And so ... with English, it's just ... the sounds that are being represented there. We're not ... seeing the shared meaning in the visual word forms. So typically, (in) languages. there's a continuum of those that represent sound, (and) those that represent meaning. Because in English, we do have certain letter patterns that are more meaning-based than sound-based. But then especially with English, there's (a) kind of added layer of 'messiness' we could call it and so while you could say 'oh well, you know sounds are represented by symbols, that sounds quite straightforward', language is a dynamic thing. They don't ... stay static, and so they change over time; so oral language changes, but written language is often a bit slow at catching up. ... We particularly see this in an old language like English. And again we can take the example of the word 'book' again. So if we look at the word 'book' we see two vowel letters and this would in a purely phonetic system ... would suggest a long vowel sound. And so, in older English, actually the word book was pronounced with a longer vowel, perhaps sounding something like 'boook', whereas, in the Middle Ages, we had a big vowel shift in English so in the 1300s and the 1600s vowels changed their sound, so the original "ooo" sound in this word actually became shortened to sound like how we say it now, 'book'. Whereas ... the oral language changed but the written language stayed the same. And so the Great Vowel Shift is quite a dramatic example but languages are always slightly shifting. And so this is why languages like English are much less regular than a newer language. So for example, Finnish, has only had a written form for relatively a much shorter time. And so the sound-letter relationships in Finnish still remain much more consistent. ... You might hear a term, transparency, to represent this relationship. So, Finnish is a very transparent language. The letter-sound correspondences are nice and predictable whereas (in) English, where there's been both these vowel shifts, there's been ... ... the introduction of words from other languages (and) many other shifts. This means that it's actually a lot less transparent and less regular. So this actually has big implications for children learning to read. Because, as you might guess it's actually ... a harder task when the letter-sound correspondences, or the rules are not so consistent and so there is actually now evidence ... there was a study that looked at children learning to read across many European countries. And this study actually found that children learning English, although having similar intensity of instruction, when actually learning the basic word recognition skills, it was taking them longer than in more transparent languages, such as Finnish or Greek. And this ... this was not a result of, you know, inferior teachers, or anything like that. It's really felt that, teaching techniques aside, there's just more to learn with a language like English. So, this can be where we actually see reading difficulties can be more manifest, because actually it's easier to struggle with English we could say. This also means, if we think about different types of qualities of language and writing systems, it also has an impact on what will predict success in learning to read. So in alphabetic languages, we've said that sound is quite clearly represented in the symbols. And so, in turn, this means that sound awareness, this we call ... phonological awareness, and we'll talk about this more in future segments (and) weeks. This sound awareness, because it's so critical to the writing system, is actually a key predictor in many alphabetic languages of whether a child is going to be a successful reader or not. And so you ... can assess phonological awareness early on. And it will actually give you a good sense of whether a child is at risk or not. And, as I say, next week we'll actually talk about some of the ways that you can assess phonological awareness. Whereas a logographic language like Mandarin, because the sound information is less critical, phonological awareness, we're now coming to understand, ... does still predict some, of the trajectory of reading in Mandarin-speaking children, but actually, we see that things like visual memory, and also something called morphological awareness is important if you're learning Chinese. Morphological awareness is ... these little segments of words that represent grammar. ... and ... can be a kind of gateway into meaning. So, so different types of skills are going to be predictive for different languages. And this is important as we think about early detection. For more information about, about specific qualities of languages, you can go to the Dyslexia International website and also we will post some of this information on the course site where there's more specific information about the main six world languages. So there you will see some more aspects and get a sense of whether the languages are alphabetic, (how) transparent they are (and) some of the predictors of reading. And ... my final slide here is showing it's also important to think about reading direction. Many languages, including English, we will read from left to right, and we assume that that's the norm. And whereas in languages such as Hebrew, you read the other way, so languages can vary in so many dimensions which is really quite fun to think about. So, as we now move forward, returning to talking more about English, do keep these differences in mind and think about how they are going to impact the experience of learning to read.
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