¡Descarga Infant School Children: Age, Cognitive, Affective, Personality Factors, and Intelligences y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! Se O NN
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CHARACTERISTICS OF INFANT SCHOOL CHILDREN ∞ Age ∞ Cognitive factors ∞ Affective factors ∞ Personality factors ∞ Multiple Intelligences ∞ The good language learner Age 1. Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 years) • A child comes into the world knowing almost nothing, but they have the potential that comes in the form of: - brain make up - reflexes such as sucking or visual orienting - innate tendencies to adapt to environment - infants use these potentials to explore and gain an understanding about themselves and the environment - they have a lack of object permanence, no ability to conceive things as existing outside their immediate vicinity Age 2. Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years) • The child is capable of mental representations, but does not have a system for organising this thinking (intuitive rather than logical thought). • The child is egocentric: a classical example is a preoperational child who will cover his/her eyes so he/she can’t see someone and think that that person can’t see him/her either. • The child has ridged thinking, which involves: – Centration: a child will become completely fixed on one point, not allowing them to see the wider picture. – State: can only concentrate on what something looks like at that time. – Appearance: focuses on how something appears rather than reality. – Lack of Reversibility: can’t reverse the steps they have taken. – Lack of Conservation: realising that something can have the same properties even if it appears differently. Age 3. Concrete Operations (7 to 11 years) • Intelligence is both symbolic and logical. The child acquires ‘operations’ = a set of general rules and strategies • The most critical part of operations is realising ‘reversibility’ = both physical and mental processes can be reversed and cancelled out by others. • The tasks of concrete operations are: – seriation: putting items (such as toys) in height order. – classification: the difference between two similar items such as daisies and roses. – conservation: realising something can have the same properties, even if it appears differently • Operations and conservations don’t develop at the same time. They develop gradually and are not an ‘all or nothing’ phenomenon. For example, the first to develop is number conservation followed by mass conservation, area conservation, liquid conservation and finally solid volume conservation. • Thinking is not abstract. It is limited to concrete phenomena and the child’s own past experiences. Affective Factors • Motivation is a complex factor which includes several phases and components: – intrinsic motivation is associated with better and long-term learning – extrinsic motivation with short-term learning for children. • Anxiety seems to be an inherent factor in language learning. Children start to manifest anxiety when language learning becomes more formally instructed and demands communicative interactions without preparation. • Anxiety is prevented when teachers provide a safe atmosphere and deal with errors in a constructive way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf6lqfNTmaM Personality Factors • Self-esteem and self-efficacy are self-perceptions. It is during the school years that both factors are mostly rooted. The learning difference between children with high or low levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy is enormous. • Personality factors constitute another differentiating factor. There seems to be no single factor that may be regarded as the ideal one. • When dealing with oral communication, extroversion, risk-taking and empathy can help learners to develop speaking faster. Multiple Intelligences • The theory of multiple intelligences claims that every single person is intelligent in a different way, and at least gifted for three different intelligences. • Dealing with individual characteristics in the classroom means showing respect for every single student, no matter their sex, personality. • Learning a language is not only a cognitive process, such as becoming skilled at communication and grammar, but also an emotional experience
