Children's Reading Essay Planning

Points that could be made in the essay

• Overview
• Lineation of the two texts
• Skinner - imitation, correction, positive and negative reinforcement, Nilem giving them the answers,
• Vygotsky - scaffolding
• Emphasis placed on different words - capitals, speech bubbles, exclamation marks,
• Context - classroom setting, teaching assistance not parent, giving the answer in order to not miss meaning, reading for meaning, reading for pleasure, reading schemes,  
• Context cues - Images
• Defective orthography - “bow” becomes "boo"

Paragraph
In both texts, the teaching assistant, Nilem, seems to be giving both Tom and Tania, the correct pronunciation of words such as “trusty” or even just finishing off a word that they haven’t finished saying in their utterance such as when Tania says “sher” and Nilem says “lock”. It is interesting that unlike some other caregivers, Nilem just gives the children the answer rather than letting them explore the possible answer for themselves using context cues and sounding out the words. There are many reasons why Nilem could have not scaffolded them but finished their utterance and let them imitate which may mean that the children are unlikely to remember how to pronounce those words, it could be because it is an educational environment and the teaching assistance may have little experience with helping children read and may have to read to several more children so by providing the answer it speeds up the reading process. However, it could be that by just providing the standard pronunciation it allows for the child to not lose the meaning of the story because if they were busy trying to correct themselves they would lose their place in the story and may begin to lose interest in reading and may find reading more of a chore rather than an enjoyable experience. Also, there are times during the readings where Nilem does give the children some time to figure out how to pronounce certain words and when they seem 'stuck' Nilem finishes their utterance. However, there are also times where it could be interpreted as Nilem interrupting the children and finishing their utterance because Nilem doesn't believe the child may know how to pronounce that word, maybe that particular word is harder to pronounce or Nilem knew they had difficulty pronouncing that word before.

Something on The British Library...

I was looking at this text on The British Library’s website. The reason I found this particular timeline interesting, even though there were others on the website, was because of how they decided to end the timeline. Although the last part of the timeline was "1900s - present day", many of the coinages that they included were quite old, such as "gasmasks" and "gobstoppers", and surprisingly didn't include any of the newer neologisms such as "selfie" or "duckface". However, this is likely to be the case because this aspect of the website is unlikely to be constantly updated possibly because of time which suggests this is a constraint of the text. Another reason why this text may not have included new coinages is possibly because of the audience which could possibly be older people and so newer neologisms may not have felt necessary to include and they may have given the timeline more an informal tone rather than giving the impression that the text is for informing purposes and may need to show a more formal tone. In the text I found the use of the noun "weirdo" which comes from the root word "weird" which is an adjective, the coinage seems to have come from the conversion of the root word to an adjective by affixing a non-standard suffix of “o”. This isn’t uncommon as this seems to have happened to other words too such as “sad” has become “saddo” and “psyche” has become “psycho”. This word could be evidence for both diachronic and synchronic language change because the root word’s denotations could be considered diachronic language change because when it was first coined it used to mean fantastic, bizarre and have connotations of the supernatural. Over time it seems to the adjective “weird” has become more pejorative and have connotations of “freak” and “strange”. “Weirdo” could be evidence for synchronous language change because this seems to be more of a recent coinage, and from the timeline, we can tell it happened during the 1900s.