George reading essay: 'Young readers should be corrected whenever they make a mistake' - evaluate.

As expected, children make mistakes whilst initially learning to read, however these mistakes are more appropriately thought of as virtuous errors, as it is obvious why the child has made them. Overgeneralisation, a form of virtuous error, is where a child over applies a grammatical rule usually adding 'ed' to irregular verbs such as saying 'I runned' rather than 'I ran'. Whether these 'virtuous errors' should be corrected or not is a very controversial topic, some caregivers prefer to help children if they get stuck on a word where as others prefer to let the the child to solve their own problems. I will be identifying this argument in relation to various theories and the Text provided.




Children are taught to read in schools, using a method called 'synthetic phonics' which involves teaching letter sound correspondence, and then putting these sounds together to create words. We can see this approach is also used by the child's mother when he struggles to say the word 'sandbags' and she suggests to 'sound it out'. Despite this being initially successful George then pronounces it incorrectly again as 'sanbags'. The elision of the 'd' sound may possibly be explained as a consonant cluster reduction, where children are likely to find the production of a consonant cluster difficult, so they reduce them to smaller units. Noun compounds such as these are also a hard concept to grasp as a young reader. This highlights the idea that children have to be reminded several times before the word is more deeply processed and learnt suggesting that it is a good idea to correct a child every time  they get a word wrong to reinforce it allow them to learn the standard form. However in this instance we cannot see whether after the second correction George has gone on to pronounce the word 'sandbags' correctly.


Jerome Bruner developed the interactionist theory in which he said that language is not acquired simply through teaching, but more importantly through interaction between the child and caregiver and in order to do this the caregiver must use child directed speech or CDS. He identified several different traits of CDS that include: speaking more slowly, using a high degree of repetition and a frequent use interrogatives, all of which can be seen within the utterance 'what's happening (.) what do you think is happening (2.0)'. In this instance George's mother is clearly encouraging him to answer independently rather than just correcting him portrayed by the subjective pronoun 'you'. Arguably this could  be seen as a more effective way of learning to read as George will not become dependent upon his mother and hopefully this will allow him to be able to read in her absence. For this reason, together Vygotsky and Bruner developed 'scaffolding' the collective name for the strategies that caregivers teach children to aid their language development which may be a more suitable way of learning language as the child will then adopt these strategies and then use them when reading on their own. Despite a wide amount of evidence portraying the positive effect on child-caregiver interaction Bruner's theory has been challenged by refuting evidence and theory. Noam Chomsky believes that a child could not possibly learn language through imitation alone as a large proportion of the language spoken in their presence is highly irregular and sometimes incorrect.

George's mother praises George for pronouncing words correctly on various occasions with the use of phrases such as 'well done', 'good boy' and 'that's it' to promote this behaviour. She also uses praise  when he makes virtuous errors in order to encourage him to try again him and not knock his confidence. We can also see examples of positive reinforcement whereby the mother rewards the child with a positive outcome, identified by Skinner. When George makes the word guessing error by reading 'upstairs' rather than 'upset' his mother says 'no (.) it looks like upstairs doesn't it (.) but look at the word'. We may initially see this as negative reinforcement due to use of the negative participle 'no' although she rewards him for understanding that 'upstairs' and 'upset' are visually similar words. This is an notable factor when discussing the idea of correcting a child's language, as it is important to be sensitive as they may become discouraged if they do not feel as if they are making progress within their development of language.


As we can see, there are instances where correcting a child's language is very beneficial and will help them although there are evidently right and wrong ways of doing so. In spite of this I do believe that corrections are not always appropriate in order to make learning to read a more enjoyable and rewarding experience for children.