Young readers should be corrected
whenever they make a mistake
Positive
Reinforcement is a vital aspect for a child to learn when they have used
language grammatically correct. When George struggles to pronounce the low
frequency lexis ‘sandbags’, his Mother uses the strategy of telling George to
pronounce the individual phonemes which make up the compound word. By it being
a compound word, George struggles with the unstressed sound of the grapheme‘d’
so when pronounced grammatically correct, his Mother enforces praise with ‘well
done’ and therefore positive reinforcement. Because George has identified that his Mother
praises him when he does something correctly, later on in the transcript,
George seeks positive reinforcement with the cloaked imperative ‘but he isn’t letting
them get inside is he’. Although this question implies George already knows the
answer, he is seeking reassurance from his Mother and gets it when she replies
with ‘no’ which shows she agrees with him.
To allow a
young reader to know when they have made a mistake, their face needs should be encountered
for is you want to make a positive difference. When George misses out to pluralise
the concrete noun ‘house’, his Mother picks up on him miscuing the ending so
goes with the strategy of spelling out the phonemes he missed as she found this
technique worked previous. She follows
on from this with a bold on record utterance ‘watch the endings’. Although this
can be seen as a harsher more forward way to correct an early reader, by
helping George via breaking up the phonemes first, mitigates the utterance. His
Mother follows on with allowing George know he made another mistake with ‘nooo’
. The over-expanded use of the grapheme ‘o’, mitigates this negative
reinforcement as she is caring for Georges face needs by not wanting him to
feel of a lower status. This supports Goodman’s ‘Top Down’ approach with the
Mother not giving George the answer but instead, allows him to self-correct.
Vygotsky
believes that the help of others via scaffolding will improve a child’s
understanding of something they do not already know, but will, with the help of
an adult. George’s Mother uses scaffolding when she breaks up the compound word
‘sandbags’ into the separate concrete nouns ‘sand’ and ‘bags’. By George copying
his Mother without being asked to, implies he wants to learn how to annunciate it
clearly, as well as his Mother wanting him to with her praising him after with
positive reinforcement of ‘well done’ . However, at the end of the transcript,
George’s Mother immediately corrects his word-guessing error of ‘made’ with the
correct word ‘may’. The reason behind
this may to preserve the flow of the utterance with the sentence George reading
out, being relatively long. It could also be to keep George’s attention as he
has been given lots of new information throughout the transcript and so may not
remember anymore.
All in all, I
believe a young reader should be corrected when they have made a mistake. This
is because it allows them to identify a mistake in the future and hopefully
self-correct, and the use of praise via positive reinforcement is important to
allow the child know when they have pronounced everything correctly.
