Principles and Best Practices for Teaching English to Elementary文档.pdf

Arkansas TESOL April 25, 2003 Principles and Best Practices for Teaching English to Elementary Learners Mary Lou McCloskey, Ph.D. Key Theorists and Researchers on What Children Bring to language learning 1. Nativists Children Bring… Innate “programming” to acquire language (Chomsky , Pinker, 2000) Critical Period for language acquisition Learn by pattern-seeking, active interaction with people and environment 2. Jean Piaget Concepts of Assimilation (adding new information to current schema) and A ccommodation (changing schema to concur with new information) Stages of Cognitive Development o Sensorimotor (birth-2) o Pre-operational (2-7) o Concrete Operations (7-11) o Formal Operations (11-15) Piaget’s Mountains Task o Developed to determine child’s ability to take another’s point of view o Hughes’ Policeman task (reported by Donaldson, 1978) showed that children could perform better in a task with which they could identify 3. Lev Vygotsky Importance of language for cognitive development Importance of social learning: Teaching is assisted performance Development and learning meet in the Zone of Proximal Development (learning zone) 4. Jerome Bruner Also put emphasis on language Stressed the value of formats routines Explored the nature of mediation developed the concept of scaffolding. Tasks of scaffolding included: o Getting children interested in the task Mary Lou McCloskey mlmccloskey@ 1 o Simplify