Wk 1 Evocative Object

Zhua Zhou

Before getting into my evocative object, I would like to introduce a tradition in China which is called “zhua zhou” (grab at one year old).

When children reach one year old, parents will put out various items for them to pick from. This is viewed as a prophecy of what the kid would do as an adult.

Reading about the evocative object articles makes me think about this tradition. It is interesting that in today's world where everything is digitized, people still make kids "grab" real objects instead of asking the kid to "select" on touch screen. Unfortunately, none of me and my parents remember what I grabbed at one-year-old. What I am sure about is that I did not grab what I am going to introduce next— a Repeater.

Repeater

This is a cassette player that has some fancy functions.


Function 1: it can record and repeat upto 240 seconds content of what it just played.

Function 2: it can record and repeat up to 240 seconds content of what you just said.

Function 3: it can play the cascade content and your words back to back for comparison.


It is called a Repeater and it was prevailing as an English learning tool in China in mid 90’s. I don’t know how many kids actually used it to study versus how many only used it to listen to pop music. But I can play this all day long with all three functions and try to mimic the English pronunciation as accurate as I could. I did not think I was studying. For me, this was a super fun toy.

Why was it fun? Now thinking back with some levels of understanding of myself, I came up with the following reasons.

  1. Controllable and configurable. I can control it to play, replay, record my repeating, compare. I can control how long it replays and records.
  2. I can hear my own voice and compare how well I did to the original content immediately. There is a short feedback loop and rewarding system.
  3. Hearing the sound is a good mnemonic tool to help me memorize the content.


I have probably repeated all my English textbooks using this machine. I also use it to play songs and repeat my favorite lines over and over again.

Now when I learn a new word, I prefer to be able to hear it and repeat it. Sometimes I really wish I still have this machine so that it can help me tell whether I said certain english words right or wrong. Examples: year and ear.

I also like being able to hear the content instead of only reading when studying new knowledge. When it comes to novels, it is a different story. I love reading novels on paper but listening to knowledge. How People Learn was painful for me to learn online through 80% text content. I ended up reading it out loud to myself in order to understand things. But the positive side of this is, in most classrooms, teachers are talking! That is great. I comprehend very well when teachers talk. This, especially in China’s K12 school environment in which teachers talk the majority of the time, brought me some advantages in studying at school.

Many people did well in reading and writing but had difficulties in listening and speaking English at school. They probably didn’t discover the fun of this device.