holiday h/w - George transcript

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.