Ensayo xv años

Theories of learning on which you base your syllabus
THE THEORIES OF LANGUAGE THAT SUPPORT THIS COURSE ARE THE FOLLOWING: JUSTIFY. (YOU MAY INCLUDE SOME INFORMATION RELATED TO HOW CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGES, HOW CHILDREN THINK AND LEARN AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AT PRIMARY LEVEL (THE PRIMARY ENGLISH TEACHER´S GUIDE)

We know that learning is commonly defined as a process that bringstogether cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one's knowledge, skills, values, and world views, so which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition that deals with acquisition in both children and adults of additional languages. According to Noam Chomsky, all children are bornwith the ability to learn language. He believed that all babies possess a "language acquisition device." Children are born with the ability to produce speech simply by hearing words and sentences spoken by adults around them. The first rules that the child learns are the rules for making words plural and making the past tense of words.

There are a number of stages through which children passin the process of acquiring their first language system they acquire and some of the process involved.

Learning a first language, aspects of the language system:

1.- babbling: from birth eight months babies can hear and produce a wide range of noises and sounds.

2.- the first word: at about eleven months infants put names (in their own fashion) to the objects and people aroundthem. (Vocalization)

3.- two words: between eighteen months and two years, they enter a genuinely syntactic phase of acquisition by placing two words together. (Look daddy)

4.- phonological, syntactic and lexical norms: the third and fourth years are periods of great creativity, when the essential language elements are put in place. (children in L1 may have some problems with individualsounds or consonant clusters).

5.- Syntactic and lexical complexity and richness: Between six and twelve, children continue to expand their Reading vocabulary and to improve their understanding of words. School-age children who are helped to see the relationship between words and who notice common word structures develop larger vocabularies than those without such training. As children becomeolder they are able to give more abstract and self-oriented definitions of words.

6.- Conversational skills: in interactional tasks, young children may not know that they do not understand or that directions they are given are incomplete and unclear. They may simply continue without showing incomprehension or asking questions. As children get older they are more able to take another person´sperspective and are better at using persuasive arguments to get what they want.




It is interesting that the term learner-centred, meaning that children´s needs and interests are placed at the centre of planning and teaching, is no longer as commonly used as before. Whereas what was often necessary was ensuring there was some learning in the fun. If we want focus on learning –centredteaching it is vital that we are well-informed about the physical, emotional, conceptual and educational characteristics of children and how theory has shaped our views on how children think and learn. The young children, on the other hand, are not yet in control of their own language, as well as learn another one.

All children were seen to go through a series of clearly defined stages ofintellectual development. It is now widely accepted that piaget under-estimated the role of language and the role of play.
The means that we can think of learners as having individual differences but who learn using similar strategies to other children.
Bruner (1983) investigated why children find school learning so difficult. He discovered that this was because children experienced it as very...