Cognitive considerations on Second Language Acquisition
- 1. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS ON SLA Veronica Victoria Valle Velazquez
- 2. Piaget’s Stages of cognitive development: • Sensorimotor Stage Brith to 2 years • Preoperational Stage 2 to 7 years • Operational Stage 7 to 16 years • Concrete Operational 7 to 11 years • Formal Operational 11 to 16 years
- 3. Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2) • The infant learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring its environment). • During the sensorimotor stage a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include object permanence; self-recognition; deferred imitation; and representational play. • They relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally • At about 8 months the infant will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they can’t see them and the infant will search for them when they disappear.
- 4. Preoperational Stage (2 to 7) • Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. • During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself. • A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not yet capable of logical (problem solving) type of thought. • Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a people.
- 5. Operational Stage (7 to 16) Concrete Operational (7 to 11) • During this stage, children begin to thinking logically about concrete events. • Children begin to understand the concept of conservation; understanding that, although things may change in appearance, certain properties remain the same. • During this stage, children can mentally reverse things (e.g. picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape). • During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. Formal Operational (11 to 16) • Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. Formal operational thought is entirely freed from physical and perceptual constraints. • During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.g. no longer needing to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions). • They can follow the form of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples. • Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions. E.g. if asked ‘What would happen if money were abolished in one hour’s time? they could speculate about many possible consequences.
- 6. Critial Period of SLA Puberty (age 11): the child becomes more capable of abstract thinking. One can argue that the transition from concrete to abstract thinking (at 11) is the critical period of SLA.
- 7. Equilibration Piaget used the concept of equilibrium to describe one of four critical factors in cognitive development, the others being maturation, physical environment, and social interaction. Progressive interior organization of knowledge in a stepwise fashion. Desequilibrium States of doubt and uncertainty Equilibrium States of resolution and certainty
- 8. Rote and Meaningful learning Rote Learning Rote learning is the memorization of information based on repetition. Examples of rote learning include memorizing the alphabet, numbers, and multiplication tables. Meaningful Learning Meaning learning to the concept that the learned knowledge is fully understood by the individual and that the individual knows how that fact relates to other stored facts (stored in your brain that is).
- 9. SLA: adults vs children It can be concluded that young learners are not better, but they will achieve excellent language outcome in the ultimate second language learning. Children will do some better performance than adults in some areas such as the native accent, but adults will be the fast language learner.
Editor's Notes
- #3: Piaget was a Swiss psychologist that introduced the Mental Processes of a child. Cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate capacities and environmental events, and children pass through a series of stages. Piaget's stages are:
- #8: Cognition develops through moving from states of doubt and uncertainty to states of resolution and certainty, and then back to doubt, which is in time resolved, and so the cycle continues up through the age of 14 or 15, when formal operations finally are firmly organized, and equilibrium is reached. Equilibrium may provide motivation for language acquisition. So, until the state of final equilibrium, the child is cognitively ready and eager to acquire language. Another related issue is the children’s indifference to contradictions and ambiguities. Intellectual maturity, however, produces an awareness of ambiguities and heighten the need to resolve them. This awareness of the enormous complexities of acquiring an additional language may make the process overwhelming, and thus discouraging.
- #9: Aubusel noted a distinction between these two ways of learning, and established that people from all ages need a little rote learning, but many of the things we learn are acquired are acquired by meaningful learning. Rote Learning is used by adults to learn things with artificial pruproses, just for short-term memory.