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READING #1: THE CHILD AS A LANGUAGE LEARNER

CHILDREN LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Taking a learning – centered perspective
Knowledge about children´s learning is seen as central to effective teaching. Successful lessons and activities are those that are tuned to the learning needs of pupils, rather than to the demands of the next text-book unit, or to the interests of the teacher.Learner-centered teaching places the child at the center of teacher thinking and curriculum planning.
If a teacher concern is centered on the child, there is a temptation to stay in that first place or to follow the child. The time available in busy school timetable for language teaching is too short to waste on activities that are fun but do not maximize learning. The teacher has to do what the childmay not be able to do: to keep in sight the longer view, and move the child toward increasingly demanding challenges, so that no learning potential is wasted. A learning-centered perspective on teaching will help us to do that more effectively.
We need therefore to draw on work from beyond language classrooms: in child development, in learning theory, in first language development, and in thedevelopment oa a second language in bilingual contexts.

PIAGET
The child as active learner
Piaget´s concern was with how young children function in the world that surrounds them, and how this influences their mental development. The child is seen as continually interacting with the world around her/him, solving problems that are presented by the environment. It is through taking action to solveproblems that learning occurs. Thought is seen as deriving from action; action is internalized, on carried out mentally in the imagination, and in this way thinking develops.
Piagetian psychology differentiates two ways in which development can take place as a result of activity: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation happens when action takes place without any change to the child;accommodation involves the child adjusting to the features of the environment in some way. Assimilation and accommodation are initially adaptive processes of behavior, but they become processes of thinking. Accommodation is an important idea that has been taken into second language learning under the label “restructuring”, used to refer to the re-organization of mental representations of a language.From a Piagetian viewpoing, a child`s thinking develops as gradual growth of knowledge and intellectual skills towards a final stage of formal, logical thinking. However, gradual growth is punctuated with certain fundamental changes, which cause the child to pass through a series of stages. At each stage, the child is capable of some types of thinking but still incapable of other. In particular, thePiagetian endpoint of development is held to be unavailable to children before they reach 11 years of age or more.

Implications of Piagetian theory for language learning
The child as sense maker
We can take from Piaget the very important idea of the child as an active learner and thinker, constructing his or her own knowledge from working with objects or ideas. Children also seek outintentions and purposes in what they see other people doing, bringing their knowledge and experience to their attempts to make sense of other people`s actions and language. Realizing that children are active “sense-makers”, but that their sense-making is limited by their experience, is a key to understanding how they respond to tasks and activities in the language classroom that we will use throughoutthis book.

VYGOTSKY
The child as social
Although Vygotsky`s theory is currently most noted for his central focus on the social, and modern developments are often labeled “sociocultural theory”, he did not neglect the individual or individual cognitive development. The development of the child´s first language in the second year of life is held to generate a fundamental shift in cognitive...