*** You can think about language in terms of its ***

features:

The phonology of a language is its use of sounds. Phonology includes knowing which sounds make up the language, rules for how those sounds may be combined, and how they are pronounced. Different languages are made up of different inventories of sounds, for example English does not have the trilled “rr” sound which makes Spanish sound so musical.

The morphology of a language describes individual sounds or sound combinations that convey meaning. Morphemes may be as small as one sound, for example a final –s on the end of a word in English indicates a plural. Morphology also includes the rules which describe how morphemes may be put together to create words.

The syntax of a language is its rules for ordering words in sentences. Different languages have different rules for combining adjectives with nouns, or for indicating tense. When ELLs make syntactical errors in English, it is likely to be because they are following the syntax of their home language.

Semantics describes how meaning is conveyed by combining words and phrases into sentences. A sentence may be syntactically correct but semantically incorrect, for example Tadpoles score truthfully (noun-verb-adverb) has correct word order but makes no sense.

Graphonics refers to the way that a language translates its oral form into a written form. Some languages are written phonetically while others are written with symbols or characters.

Teachers of reading know these last three as the three cueing systems for determining unknown words while reading: meaning (semantics)/does it make sense?; visual (graphophonic)/does it look right?; and structure (syntactic)/does it sound right?