Characteristics of a Community of Learners

Phonological System

The sound system of English with approximately 44 sounds and more than 500 ways to spell them

• Phoneme (the smallest unit of sound)
• Grapheme (the written representation of a phoneme using one or more letters)
• Phonological awareness (knowledge about the sound structure of words, at the phoneme, onset-rime, and syllable levels)
• Phonemic awareness (the ability to orally manipulate phonemes in words)
• Phonics (instruction about phoneme-grapheme correspondences and spelling rules)

• Pronouncing words
• Detecting regional and other dialects
• Decoding words when reading
• Using invented spelling
• Reading and writing alliterations and onomatopoeia
• Noticing rhyming words
• Dividing words into syllables

Syntactic System

The structural system of English that governs how words are combined into sentences

• Syntax (the structure or grammar of a sentence)
• Morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language)
• Free morpheme (a morpheme that can stand alone as a word)
• Bound morpheme (a morpheme that must be attached to a free morpheme)

• Adding inflectional endings to words
• Combining words to form compound words
• Adding prefixes and suffixes to root words
• Using capitalization and punctuation to indicate beginnings and ends of sentences
• Writing simple, compound, and complex sentences
• Combining sentences

Semantic System

The meaning system of English that focuses on vocabulary

• Semantics (meaning)
• Synonyms (words that mean the same or nearly the same thing)
• Antonyms (opposites)
• Homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently)

• Learning the meanings of words
• Discovering that many words have multiple meanings
• Using context clues to figure out an unfamiliar word
• Studying synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms
• Using a dictionary and a thesaurus

Pragmatic System

The system of English that varies language according to social and cultural uses

• Function (the purpose for which a person uses language)
• Standard English (the form of English used in textbooks and by television newscasters)
• Nonstandard English (other forms of English)

• Varying language to fit specific purposes
• Reading and writing dialogue in dialects
• Comparing standard and nonstandard forms of English