How Do Young Learners Learn Language

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Lesson 1 How do young learners learn language? Chapter 2 A Brief Historical Understanding of How Children Learn and Develop We do not have room in this course to consider all the studies that have involved children's learning, or their learning of foreign or second languages. However, we will take a brief look at those that have particular relevance and interest to us as TEYL practitioners today. Views of Piaget We will go back in history to look at the work of Jean Piaget, a well-known theorist in developmental psychology, who tried to work out how children thought and developed cognitively. In the 1960s and 1970s, Piaget set up various experiments to ascertain how children thought in and about different situations so that he could determine how they cognitively developed. He was particularly keen to understand how a child, as a 'lone scientist' or thinker, would solve problems during his or her life experiences, and how approaches to problem-solving might change as that individual got older and had more learning experiences. Piaget's assumption was that children actively constructed knowledge from their experiences. From birth, he saw them as trying to make sense of the world through their actions. This made children central to their own learning. Piaget wanted to try to establish how children made sense of their world and how they tried to work things out for themselves. (Piaget 1967, Cameron 2001) Developmental stages of children Based on the results from his work and research with children, carried out under rather strict conditions in research laboratories, Piaget suggested that children developed through specific stages. These stages were: • Sensori-Motor Stage (from 0 - 18 months) in which children seemed to learn through interaction with the world around them, largely through the use of their senses. This was a stage where Piaget felt children
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