Written Language & Literacy - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2013

This article explores the creative use of unconventional spelling in brand names. Using insights from the indexical approach to the linguistic construction of identity, it demonstrates how unconventional spelling produces a myriad of effects and meanings, which in turn help construct brand identities. First, it identifies the various strategies of unconventional spelling, investigates their potential to convey distinctiveness, and examines other effects and meanings that they produce. It then presents a case study to further illustrate how unconventional spelling works with other marketing materials to create a unique brand identity. Unconventional spelling, because of its polarizing nature, can be a risky resource for constructing brand identities. Not only does this study contribute to an under-researched area in the sociolinguistics of orthography, but it also broadens the range of identities and linguistic resources examined in the sociolinguistic investigation of identity construction.

The relationship between orthography, phonology and morphology varies with different languages and writing systems. These relationships are by no means random. They follow rules, albeit with exceptions, even for relatively irregular languages like English. In this paper, we present the PolyOrth approach to representing these relationships, which definines orthographic forms in terms of their phonological and morphological correspondences within inheritance lexicons. The approach involves defining Finite State Transducers (FSTs), but in a much more subtle way than traditional speech-to-text or text-to-speech transducers. We define FSTs to provide phoneme to grapheme mappings for onsets, peaks and codas, as well as a grapheme to grapheme FST which defines spelling rules. We demonstrate the approach applied to English, Dutch and German. These three languages are interesting because they share many features of all three levels (orthography, morphology and phonology) whilst also demonstrating significant differences. This allows us to illustrate not only a range of different orthography/ phonology/ morphology relationships within languages but also the possibility of sharing information about such mappings across languages.

This study investigates the effects of English-medium CLIL on EFL proficiency in three European countries. Seven mainstream grammar schools spread across The Netherlands, Germany, and Italy participated with a total of 263 pupils aged 12 to 16. Several language skills were measured by means of written tests in a pre/post- test design. The first test was held when the experimental classes were all at the start of the CLIL intervention in secondary education; the second test two years later. Each of the three countries participated with two CLIL classes and two mainstream classes as control groups. The results show that CLIL classes had better EFL skills from the start: they outperformed the mainstream groups at both test rounds. However, gain scores varied per country and the apparent head start of CLIL pupils makes it difficult to interpret EFL results.

The study considers the impact of cognitive development and discourse-based factors on the ability to understand different types of written texts from middle childhood across adolescence. Reading comprehension was examined by responses to four types of questions — literal, inferential, integrative, and metatextual — based on narrative and expository texts assigned to monolingual Hebrew speakers at four age-schooling levels (4th, 7th, 11th graders, and adults). Distributional analyses revealed higher scores on comprehension of narrative compared with expository texts in the two younger groups, with comprehension continuing to improve in both genres up to 11th grade and responses of high-school students close to those of the adult participants. Qualitative evaluations of responses to the different types of questions revealed progression from a superficial grasp of basic information to in-depth interpretation of the text as a whole, with more advanced reading comprehension manifested by the ability to combine an integrative approach to text comprehension with attention to specific details and to process information from diverse points of view.

The reading scores of 4712 Hong Kong primary Grade 4 students in the 2006 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study were analyzed alongside (a) information about their gender, reading ability, independent reading practices, and attitudes towards reading; (b) parental reading attitudes and home educational resources; and (c) the way the students were taught to read in school and the school’s overall reading achievement index. Multilevel analyses were carried out to model the relationship between the student characteristics and home and school contextual factors and reading attitude. It was found that the students’ reading attitudes reflected the influence of the student’s gender, reading ability, and independent reading practices and that parental reading attitudes and home educational resources made significant contributions to the students’ reading attitudes. Moreover, teaching the students reading skills explicitly and the school’s overall reading attainment were positively related to the students’ reading attitudes. The significance of the findings is examined and the educational implications are explored and discussed.