Jared Wiggins
Hello readers. Today I would like to tell explain to you an observation about learning. My little sister Jordyn who is only 5 now is someone I observe a lot when she learns new and exciting or even difficult stuff. She never gives up when trying to learn so it is often easy to teach her new things if you know how to teach her that is, and try to not sweat the small stuff. A few months ago I was teaching her how to pronounce the name of a character on her game we brought her 2 years ago. Everyone( or a large majority) of people are familiar with the game smash brothers I presume? Well if you don’t know smash brothers is a game that puts all or most of the Nintendo characters together in a classic fighting arena to fight against each other. My sister loves playing smash brothers on the wii u and enjoys it. However there are some characters she used to have a problem saying and even now still has some small minor issues, I however was able to teach her how to say a few character names. She knows how to say simple names like Link and Pit of course but some more intermediate names such as the names of the pokemons that come from the pokeballs she has trouble with. Such as Chespin. She used to say Chest man. I however taught her how to say it the right way but breaking down the words in a more simple way. I told her to say Chess. I then asked her to say Pen. After that I simply put the words together and she started saying Chess- Pen witch translated to Chespin. There are other words I see her say correctly that she learned eventually such as Refrigerator she used to say ‘Frig frazor’ but she got past that and has learned to say her words more efficiently.
A nice observation.
You set the stage – always a good idea – then are careful to explain what you are going to talk about.
It would be nice to hear a bit more about the technique you used with your sister. What did you tell her to do, for instance? And as you coached her, what did you observe her doing? How many times did it take before she was able to pronounce the names correctly? And did you listen to see how she pronounced them when she wasn’t directly imitating you? Last, but perhaps not least, what kind of learning or learnings were involved? For instance, did you reward your sister for getting things right, making this into an example of operant conditioning?
Please end with an explicit reference.