Technical School
Keywords and Critical Elements
Key words
When a child listens and understands a sentence, he does so on the basis of a few important words in the sentence. In other words, he doesn't understand or even listen to each and every word. These important words are called key words. In sentences we normally use with a child, these are words that are familiar to the child.
For example, in the sentence: "Put on your shoes and socks", we may say there are three key words: put on (even though it is a phrase, not a single word), shoes, and socks. A child who pays attention to one key word might just get the shoes, while a child who understands two key words might either put on his shoes, put on his socks or just get the shoes and socks but not put them on.
Critical Elements
These are words that a child must understand in order to understand the entire sentence. Consider the example where you show the child blue and brown shoes and ask him to pick out the blue shoes. In order to understand the instruction, he must discriminate and understand the words blue and brown. Since both choices are shoes, he doesn’t need to understand the word ‘shoes’. Thus, understanding this instruction involves the processing of 1 critical element.
Now, say, we give him a choice of shoes or sandals, each of which could be blue or brown. In order to understand the instruction and correctly pick out the item, he now has to listen, discriminate, and understand both "critical elements", namely the type of footwear, and its color. In other words, he needs to process 2 critical elements to understand the instruction. In this way, we can introduce more critical elements in a sentence to make it increasingly challenging. When the choices are in front of the child or in the room within his sight, we call the task a "closed set" task. Learn more about closed sets and open sets here.