The importance of capital letters, what have I missed?

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stephen
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Feb 25, 2003 9:06 am

The importance of capital letters, what have I missed?

Post by stephen » Thu Mar 13, 2003 4:57 pm

I was asked this question on the job discussion forum, "why do we still use capital letters?"

I have a feeling that my response is missing something. I covered their importance in scanning and how they help the reader by idenifying proper nouns. (My origional post as at http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewt ... c&start=15 ) However, I think that I have missed something. I am sure that there must be some reason why we use them at the beginning of sentences. I also feel intuitively that they could assist chunking and make for more efficient eye fixations while reading (possibly helping identifying noun clauses and where sentences begin/end). I would be interested to know if anyone knows whether this is correct, or can offer a solid explanation of why we use them at the start of sentences.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.
Regards
Stephen

LarryLatham
Posts: 1195
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2003 6:33 pm
Location: Aguanga, California (near San Diego)

Capitalization of first letters in English words.

Post by LarryLatham » Fri Mar 14, 2003 5:04 pm

Stephen,

I make no claim to "knowing" about the correctness here, but your ideas seem to be sound. We appear to have two objectives in capitalizing the first letters of words: 1) to distinguish proper nouns from common nouns, and 2) to help identify the beginning of a new sentence. Those seem to me rather useful objectives. Since the vast majority of readers in this forum are English teachers, it will be clear to all why a fast and easy way to distinguish between two types of nouns will be useful. No sense in "preaching to the choir" here. And identifying the end points of sentences also is critical to understanding while reading. It is the combination of a full stop and the space and the capital letter which serves as the delimiter of sentences, I believe. If we were to eliminate the capital letter, then why not the full stop also? Or would it be a simplification of the written language to wipe out the full stop and just use the capital letter to delimit sentences? Hardly.

Some particulars of English do not require analyzing, at least not by teachers. Maybe certain types of linguists will have an interest in such a break-down, but for teachers and students, the brain power can be more profitably used elsewhere. Your statement at the beginning of your original post said it well: "...it's what we do." It is enough to know that we write English with capital letters in certain well-defined places. Why try to change it? :)

Larry Latham

stephen
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Feb 25, 2003 9:06 am

Post by stephen » Sat Mar 15, 2003 10:59 am

Larry

Thanks for the feedback. It is good to know that someone else thinks I'm on the right track.

I quite agree that from the point of view of students and teachers there is no real need to understand the specifics; to be honest the role of chunking is more an issue of personal curiosity than stuff I'd bring up in class. Although, this interest in chunking does in part stem from my classroom experience. I feel very strongly that many of the students that come to classes, for the first time, in the programme I teach chunk either very badly, or not at all. This is largely due to their educational history; they've been taught to translate rather than read. So while chunking is something I wouldn't raise in class, it is something I'm becoming increasingly interested in. As far as I can fathom the best thing to do seems to be to deal with word attack skills, and simply to get them to read a lot without translating (ie. extensive reading). But some theoretical background would be interesting.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.
Cheers
Stephen

LarryLatham
Posts: 1195
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2003 6:33 pm
Location: Aguanga, California (near San Diego)

Chunking

Post by LarryLatham » Sat Mar 15, 2003 4:29 pm

Stephen,

I quite agree with your feelings about chunking. In fact, perhaps I go further than you do on this idea in classes. I have often marked a text with slash marks indicating phrasing I think would be reasonable, then have students read aloud following the phrasing marks I've suggested. To be honest, I'm not sure how much good this does overall, but at least I believe I've raised their awareness of the concept. Normally I don't have students long enough to follow this as their reading skills significantly increase. But getting them to try to at least see English in units that are more than one word long is useful, I think. Have you ever tried something like this?

Larry Latham

Roger
Posts: 274
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2003 1:58 am

Post by Roger » Sun Mar 16, 2003 12:03 am

I have nothing to add to what has been said so competently by the two of you except to say that punctuation marks are a fairly recent addition to European languages, added around 800 uyears ago.
If I remember correctly, old English would capitalise nouns in general - much like current German still does.
Before that, only Latin and Greek had a written tradition, and in old Latin sentences would have no spaces between words. IT was much like CHinese - you must know intuitively where a word begins and where it ends. The Chinese adopted Roman punctuation even more recently, but they have no capital and lower-case "letters".

stephen
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Feb 25, 2003 9:06 am

Post by stephen » Sun Mar 16, 2003 10:59 am

Larry

Know I haven't tried that, it sounds interesting. I have actually had a couple of classes, where I did break up a sentence into chunks on the board. But I used this to contrast the way they read with how a good reader reads.

Something like this:

Good reader..

The old man/walked slowly/to the shop.

How they read

The/old/man/walked/slowly/to/the/shop.

Then explained how chunking is about eye movement and how chunking well makes a person read faster. But this was because they were not doing there out of class reading (using graded readers) not really to improve their chunking. Explaining how reading a lot (without translating)helps them read faster did seem to work (with some more than others).

Some of the stuff I do on word attack skills would fall into the category of seeing English as units because it deals with using grammar to help discover what kind of word the unknown one is. However, I really don't have nearly enough material for this. What I'm really interested in for this area (ie. word attack skills in general) is getting some work that could be given as self-study material for homework. I tend to find that my students need so much work in such a short time that it often cannot be reasonably achieved, thus I have to prioritise and do the best I can with the time available, and try and give out of class work that will allow the students prepared to work hard the opportunity to progress as fast as possible.

What I find most frustrating about teaching reading is the belief amoungst many students that I get that they are good readers no matter what evidence there is to the contary. This is probably because they have gone thorough maybe up to a decade of being taught to translate rather than read, hence, no chunking, word attack skills or an ability to skim or scan. And then I end up having to cover skills/material which are/is well below the level they are allegedly at.

Anway, thanks for the idea.
Stephen[/b]

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