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Dear friends,

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Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgeons is also getting attention around the world. Some of their recent patients have traveled to us from Germany, New Zealand, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Canada, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona, Nevada, Washington State, and Northern California.


Tummy tuck in Los Angeles

Tummy tuck is the one of the fastest-growing plastic surgery procedures. More and more people are deciding that a flat abdomen will enhance their well-being and self-esteem.


Rhinoplasty in Beverly Hills

Los Angeles plastic surgeons have exceptional academic backgrounds. Their work has received a great deal of press coverage in the media, both in magazines and on television. Dr. Lloyd Krieger is a plastic surgeon who focuses on creating an attractive nose during your rhinoplasty.

Liposuction in Los Angeles

Liposuction is the most common plastic surgery procedure. The reason is simple: The results tend to be excellent, and many of us have body areas which we wish were thinner.

Medical Director

Dr. Krieger founded Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery to improve the care and experiences of plastic surgery patients. He maintains operating privileges at UCLA Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Northridge Hospital.

Syntax

Understanding isolated words is not adequate for the task of understanding language. All languages have rules regarding how words can be combined to form sentences, and an implicit understanding of the rules of sentence structure and phrasing is essential to language comprehension.

It is difficult to assess a child's syntactic knowledge without using printed text, but as was the case with semantics, if the child must process text to take the test, then the test becomes more of a decoding skills test than a test of syntax. It is possible to make some estimations about the child's productive syntactic knowledge by listening to the sentences that the child forms when she is talking, but teachers should be aware that the productive syntax may reflect the child's own dialect, which may follow non-standard syntactic rules, and may not reflect the child's ability to process and understand syntax in other dialects (it is common for people to speak one dialect, but be able to understand many other dialects).

A child can also be asked to identify sentences (spoken) that are syntactically incorrect (e.g. "Jane and her dog the hill they climbed it" or more subtly, "Me and Jane walked up the hill."), and additionally, the child can be asked to restructure the sentence correctly.

Another common syntax test involves presenting the child with sentences which have one word omitted, and asking the child to suggest words that could fill the blanks. In this case, the meaning the word is not what is being evaluated, but instead, the child is graded based upon the syntactic appropriateness of the word. So, for example, the child may fill in the sentence, "Mary fell off of the ___" with any of several obviously appropriate words such as "chair" "house" or "wagon," but credit should be given for any noun that the child supplies (e.g. "leaf" "brain" or "mop") because they are all syntactically correct.

Another assessment of syntax involves the child's ability to combine simple sentences into complex sentences, and to add modifiers appropriately. So for example, "Brownies taste good" could be combined with, "Mary likes to eat brownies" to make the complex sentence, "Mary likes to eat brownies because they taste good." Similarly, children could be asked to appropriately insert the words, "brown" "big" and "quickly" into the sentence, "The spider ran up the wall" to make a more complex sentence such as "The big, brown spider quickly ran up the wall."

Similarly, a child's syntax can be assessed through a test of her ability to change tense and modifiers of sentences. For example, a child could be asked to restructure, "I went to the store" to the future tense.

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Semantics

To understand language, a child must understand the meaning of word parts (a.k.a. morphology) and individual words within the language (a.k.a. vocabulary), but more than that, a child must understand that words are arranged in phrases, sentences, and discourse in meaningful ways. The child must understand how to use language to communicate complete and meaningful ideas.




Semantics is a general term that just refers to "meaning." Vocabulary specifically refers to the meaning of isolated words, and morphology specifically refers to the meaning of word parts, but semantics can generally be applied to the meaning of word parts, whole words, sentences and discourse.

There are several ways to assess semantics at each of these levels, but one common thread involves the question of whether the items on the test are presented in written form. If the child is expected to read the items, the test becomes more of a decoding test than a test of semantics.
Although the items should not involve printed text, it is very common to use pictures in semantics assessments (teachers should, of course, consider the cultural relevance and sensitivity of the pictures they use). A child might be asked to provide a name for pictures as a test of expressive vocabulary, or to match spoken words with pictures as a test of receptive vocabulary. A test of semantics at the larger-than-word level may involve asking a child to arrange a series of pictures to reflect a logical sequence of events.

Another common assessment involves asking a child to provide a word that best matches a definition presented (orally) by the teacher as a test of expressive vocabulary, or to ask a child to provide a definition of a word as a test of receptive vocabulary. Similarly, a test of vocabulary knowledge could require that the child be familiar with several words in order to answer each item correctly. For example, the child could be asked to select a word which does not belong in a group of words (e.g. THREAD, STRING, ROPE, KNOT). In this sort of assessment, the child must know the meaning of most if not all of the words in each item in order to be successful.

Similarly, a child might be asked to provide a synonym or an antonym for words, which is a test of both receptive and expressive vocabulary. Again, in this case, more than one vocabulary word is being tested at a time - the child must know the meaning of the test item, and must know another word which either has the same meaning or an opposite meaning.

Morphology assessments often involve asking a child to describe how a word's meaning changes as parts of the words are changed. For example, a child could be asked to break compound words into their component parts and to describe the meaning of those component parts (e.g. DAY-BREAK, BASE-BALL, HEAD-ACHE). Or, a child could be asked to describe what happens when affixes are added to words (as in SKIP versus SKIPPED) and to explain those affixes (What do UNWRAP and UNTIE have in common?). Similarly, a child's appreciation of morphology can be assessed by asking the child to describe how words with similar parts are related (e.g. EARACHE, EARRING, EARDRUM).

Semantics assessments at the larger-than-word level usually depend on identifying words or sentences that do not make sense in the context (e.g. "Billy had a dog. He loved his dog. His fish was orange. His dog could fetch a ball."), or they depend on the child identifying logical inconsistencies (e.g. "Billy's dog could fetch and he could roll over. He was a good dog, but he didn't know any tricks.").

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Phonology

Speech is the most typical form of language, and in order to understand speech, a child must be able to clearly hear, distinguish, and categorize the phonemes within the speech. A child who is unable to distinguish between similar phonemes may develop difficulties with language comprehension. A child who has difficulty with English phonology may not be able to hear the difference between words like THIN and FIN or HERE and HAIR, and those words may confuse the child when they come up in conversation.




The most common assessment for phonology involves discriminating between two words that sound similar. In this assessment, the child is asked to listen to the teacher say pairs of words and decide if they are the same word repeated twice (which sometimes, they should be), or if they are different words. When pairs of different words are presented, they should only differ by one phoneme (and they should be similar phonemes, such as /sh/ and /s/ or /d/ and /g/). Also, when pairs of different words are presented, the location of the difference within the words should be varied (Sometimes the difference should be at the beginning, as in RHYME-LIME sometimes in the middle, as in MUD-MADE and sometimes at the end of the word, as in RIP-RIB). Also, attention should be paid to both vowels and consonants.

In a phonology test, the pairs of words do not have to be real words the child is familiar with. If a teacher wishes to make up a phonology test, she might find it easier to use made-up words. There is some merit to this approach because the child's attention is focused on the words themselves, and not on the meanings of the words.

Phonology is quite language specific, and children who speak languages other than English may be more "tuned" to the phonology of their native language. Similarly, teachers should be sensitive to the influence that dialect can play on a child's perceptions -- children who are raised immersed in one dialect of English may not be very sensitive to all of the distinct phonemes of other dialects of English.

from : www.sedl.org

Linguistic Knowledge

Most of the problem of understanding language hinges on the knowledge of the mechanics of that language. All languages have structure, and an implicit knowledge of that structure is essential to language comprehension.




Linguistic Knowledge is the synthesis of three more basic cognitive elements -- phonology, semantics, and syntax. Linguistic knowledge is more than the sum of its parts, but it does not lend itself to explicit assessment. A child may have a grasp on the more basic cognitive elements, but still have trouble blending these elements together into a stable linguistic structure. For example, if a child appears to have a grasp of the more basic cognitive elements, but is still having difficulty expressing herself or understanding others, it is likely that the child has not yet managed to synthesize those elements. Similarly, children who have limited appreciation for genre or different voices in stories may be having difficulty synthesizing the more basic linguistic elements together. Or, children who communicate well informally, but who have difficulty with more formal linguistic structures (which are often found in classroom settings) may be having difficulty applying linguistic knowledge. An assessment of linguistic knowledge is less straightforward than other cognitive elements, and is often revealed through elimination of other possibilities.

Teachers should be careful not to confuse dialect differences with a lack of linguistic knowledge. Teachers should also know that, especially when considering a child's appreciation of genre, voice, and formal linguistic forms, children who primarily speak languages other than English may have more advanced linguistic knowledge in their native language than in English.

Elements Supporting Language Comprehension

Background Knowledge

In order to understand language, the child must have some background knowledge to use as a reference for interpreting new information. Moreover, if the child is expected to understand something specific, her background knowledge must be relevant to what she is expected to understand.




There are many assessments on the market that measure a child's general knowledge of facts about the world. Usually some estimation is made of what one could reasonably expect children in the first grade to know (e.g. birds build nests in trees, or bicycles have two wheels), and the child is asked to answer these simple "fact" questions (similar to what would be found on the old intelligence tests). However, the most informative assessment is a measure of the child's relevant background knowledge -- specifically, knowledge that is related to the task at hand.

For example, if a child is expected to listen to and understand the story Charlotte's Web, the child should have some background knowledge about farm animals and spiders. Children know a great many things; children raised in the city, for example, know about public transit, taxis, traffic jams, shopping malls, and sky scrapers.

Children raised in other settings know about other things. But any particular child may not know much about a particular topic. It is always worthwhile to assess a child's relevant background knowledge before expecting a child to be able to accomplish a task.

Decoding

Good readers are able to correctly pronounce familiar words, whether they are regular or irregular words, and are able to pronounce unfamiliar words in a way consistent with the conventions of written English. For skilled readers, decoding is so automatic that it requires virtually no conscious effort, so the reader can devote full attention to the task of comprehending the text.




As mentioned earlier, oral reading accuracy (a.k.a. "running record") is one form of decoding assessment, but it is not a very "clean" assessment. Teachers need to be aware that, in their early attempts to acquire reading skills, children apply many different strategies, some of which are hard to detect. Children often attempt to guess words based on the context or on clues provided by pictures - most of the time, a child's guesses are inaccurate, and their difficulties with decoding are revealed, but sometimes the child guesses correctly, making the teacher believe that the child accurately decoded the word. Teachers who use oral reading as a decoding assessment need to pay careful attention to the child as she reads - teachers should be aware that the child may appear to decode some words because those words are in the child's sight-vocabulary, and the child may appear to know other words when she is really just guessing.
A cleaner test of decoding skill is to determine the child's ability to read words out of context. Isolated words can be presented to the child one at a time, and the child can be asked to say the words aloud (this is not a vocabulary test, so children should not be expected to provide meanings for the words). The words selected for a decoding test should be words that are within the child's spoken vocabulary, and should contain a mix of phonetically regular and irregular words.

Similarly, children can be asked to match a spoken word with a written word -- the teacher can say a word or a word part orally to the child, and the child can identify the written form that matches the spoken word or word part.

Children can be tested on their accuracy (Is each word pronounced correctly?), their fluency (How much does the child struggle with word naming?), or their "level" - leveled lists of words are provided by many publishers, and the child can be assessed as to his or her ability to decode words that are of varying difficulties.

Sometimes teachers test children's ability to "recognize" sight words as a test of decoding skill, but "recognizing" words is not the same as decoding them. Decoding is a strategy that readers can use on all words, even words they've never seen before. Sight-word reading has to do with memorizing the "image" of a word or a specific feature of a word, and with this strategy, only a select few words are learned. All children go through a stage as they learn to read where they memorize a few sight words, and sometimes they are even encouraged by teachers who use Dolch word lists and frequency indexes to focus the child's attention on the most useful sight words. However, memorizing sight words does not help a child to learn how to decode words, and testing the child's knowledge of specific, well-practiced sight words does not provide a measure of his or her decoding skill.

from: http://www.sedl.org/