This is Part VII of exploring Professor Brian Cambourne’s 7 Conditions of Learning. Read from the beginning here.
Approximation
"The brain is designed to perceive and generate patterns.”
Brain Principle #6: Children need to take risks, to test out hypotheses, and make approximations as they discover overall content. Each child's brain is unique; built upon their life experiences, they are patterned to accept and process the world differently.
How many educators and policy writers are aware of Cambourne's brain principle of approximation? This foundational knowledge should be in the amour of every educator.
Mathematics is built on patterns. Learning, finding, and seeking the pattern, makes the learning of mathematics easier.
If children are arbitrarily taught mathematics, it appears to be a series of random, unrelated facts that need to be learned. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Learning English is sold as being "difficult" as there are too many exceptions to the rules. However, finding and searching for patterns makes it easier for ALL because our brains are designed to perceive and generate patterns.
When I work with vulnerable students, one of my first lessons is to have them find patterns with OCK words (sock, flock, etc.). The task is simple: once students see and identify the pattern, alongside making meaning from all the words in context, learning to read becomes manageable.
Building on language patterns allows students to make approximations. It enables them to experiment, to get words wrong, to hear it again until they see both the pattern and the irregularities.
When I look back on teaching my son, Nicholas, using the book Success for ALL, the biggest challenge was finding the pattern, and helping Nicholas understand the patterns. There were too many changes from one word to the next; for example, they went from dog to drag. With such changes, the only letters in common are the d and g. There are too many letters in between the d and g to find a typical pattern.
Today, if I were presented with such words, I would separate them into groups. Firstly, find other words that rhyme with dog—log, bog, hog, and fog. Play with these words and search for meaning. These rhyming words are quite challenging, as they may not be in the child's oral language. Many children today may not be familiar with concepts of bog or hog. If a word is not in a child's oral language, connections between oral and written language are much more challenging. Words are far more complex than we realize for young, vulnerable children. Then, in the drag group, I’d use words like rag, hag, lag, nag, sag, tag, wag.
Many of these words are complicated. Again, I ask: Which of these words are in the child's oral language? How many of these words have multiple meanings? These are all considerations used when working with "language patterns."
I’ll leave you with this, a quote from Science Brief, published in 2016, that explains to me the importance of discovering patterns in language acquisition.
"Sound co-occurrence patterns in language learning, the co-occurrences of certain sounds can be pivotal. For example, the consonant cluster /spr/ is common in English (e.g., spring, sprain, spray), whereas the cluster /sfr/ is not permissible (though is found in other languages such as Greek). Acquiring these patterns is thought to drive multiple aspects of language acquisition, including speech segmentation, a critical step in early language acquisition that allows learners to discover word boundaries within spoken language (e.g., Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996; Saffran, Newport & Aslin, 1996; Thiessen, Kronstein & Hufnagle, 2013). Sensitivity to these patterns also allows learners to more accurately predict incoming input, facilitating the perceptual processing and comprehension of language (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016)."
Finding patterns and understanding how words are grouped gives a better understanding of language. The goal must always be to create skilled readers.
