Білім беру бағдарламасына арналған торм 5206 тілдерді оқытудағы психологиялық МӘселелер пәні бойынша лекция тезистерінің жинағы

Human cognition develops rapidly throughout the first sixteen years of life and less rapidly thereafter. Some cognitive changes are critical; others are more gradual and difficult to detect. Jean Piaget outlined the course of intellectual development in a child through various stages, which are presented in Illustration – 3.1

A critical stage for a consideration of the effects of age on second lan­guage acquisition appears to occur, in Piaget's outline, at puberty (age eleven in his model). It is here that a person becomes capable of abstrac­tion, of formal thinking which transcends concrete experience and direct perception. Cognitively, then, a strong argument can be made for a critical period of language acquisition by connecting language acquisition and the concrete/formal stage transition.

Illustration 3.1 - Stages of intellectual development of a child by J. Piaget
Ausubel (1964) hinted at the relevance of such a connection when he noted that adults learning a second language could profit from certain grammatical explanations and deductive thinking that obviously would be pointless for a child. Whether adults do in fact profit from such explana­tions depends, of course, on the suitability and efficiency of the explana­tion, the teacher, the context, and other pedagogical variables. We have observed, though, that children do learn second languages well without the benefit—or hindrance—of formal operational thought. Does this capacity of formal, abstract thought have a facilitating or inhibiting effect on lan­guage acquisition in adults? Ellen Rosansky (1975) offered an explana­tion noting that initial language acquisition takes place when the child is highly "centered": "He is not only egocentric at this time, but when faced with a problem he can focus (and then only fleetingly) on one dimension at a time. This lack of flexibility and lack of decentration may well be a necessity for language acquisition."

Young children are generally not "aware" that they are acquiring a lan­guage, nor are they aware of societal values and attitudes placed on one lan­guage or another. It is said that "a watched pot never boils"; is it possible that a language learner who is too consciously aware of what he or she is doing will have difficulty in learning the second language?

You may be tempted to answer that question affirmatively, but there is both logical and anecdotal counterevidence. Logically, a superior intellect should facilitate what is in one sense a highly complex intellectual activity. Anecdotal evidence shows that some adults who have been successful lan­guage learners have been very much aware of the process they were going through, even to the point of utilizing self-made paradigms and other fabri­cated linguistic devices to facilitate the learning process. So, if mature cog­nition is a liability to successful second language acquisition, clearly some intervening variables allow some persons to be very successful second lan­guage learners after puberty. These variables may in most cases lie outside the cognitive domain entirely, perhaps more centrally in the affective—or emotional—domain.

The lateralization hypothesis may provide another key to cognitive dif­ferences between child and adult language acquisition. As the child matures into adulthood, the left hemisphere (which controls the analytical and intellectual functions) becomes more dominant than the right hemi­sphere (which controls the emotional functions). It is possible that the dominance of the left hemisphere contributes to a tendency to overanalyze and to be too intellectually centered on the task of second language learning.

Another construct that should be considered in examining the cogni­tive domain is the Piagetian notion of equilibration. Equilibration is defined as "progressive interior organization of knowledge in a stepwise fashion" (Sullivan 1967), and is related to the concept of equilibrium. That is, cognition develops as a process of moving from states of doubt and uncertainty (disequilibrium) to stages of resolution and certainty (equilib­rium) and then back to further doubt that is, in time, also resolved. And so the cycle continues. Piaget (1970) claimed that conceptual development is a process of progressively moving from states of disequilibrium to equilib­rium and that periods of disequilibrium mark virtually all cognitive devel­opment up through age fourteen or fifteen, when formal operations finally are firmly organized and equilibrium is reached.

It is conceivable that disequilibrium may provide significant motiva­tion for language acquisition: language interacts with cognition to achieve equilibrium. Perhaps until that state of final equilibrium is reached, the child is cognitively ready and eager to acquire the language necessary for achieving the cognitive equilibrium of adulthood. That same child was, until that time, decreasingly tolerant of cognitive ambiguities. Children are amazingly indifferent to contradictions, but intellectual growth produces an awareness of ambiguities about them and heightens the need for reso­lution. Perhaps a general intolerance of contradictions produces an acute awareness of the enormous complexities of acquiring an additional lan­guage, and so perhaps around the age of fourteen or fifteen, the prospect of learning a second language becomes overwhelming, thus discouraging the learner from proceeding a step at a time as a younger child would do.

The final consideration in the cognitive domain is the distinction that Ausubel made between rote and meaningful learning. Ausubel noted that people of all ages have little need for rote, mechanistic learning that is not related to existing knowledge and experience. Rather, most items are acquired by meaningful learning, by anchoring and relating new items and experiences to knowledge that exists in the cognitive framework. It is a myth to contend that children are good rote learners, that they make good use of meaningless repetition and mimicking. We have already mentioned that children's practice and imitation is a very meaningful activity that is contextualized and purposeful. Adults have developed even greater concentration and so have greater ability for rote learning, but they usually use rote learning only for short-term memory or for somewhat arti­ficial purposes. By inference, we may conclude that the foreign language class­room should not become the locus of excessive rote activity: rote drills, pattern practice without context, rule recitation, and other activities that are not in the context of meaningful communication.

It is interesting to note that C2-A2 comparisons almost always refer, in the case of children, to natural untutored learning, and for adults, to the classroom learning of a second language. Even so, many foreign language classrooms around the world still utilize an excessive number of rote-learning procedures. So, if adults learning a foreign language by rote methods are compared with children learning a second language in a nat­ural, meaningful context, the child's learning will seem to be superior. The cause of such superiority may not be in the age of the person, but in the context of learning. The child happens to be learning language meaning­fully, and the adult is not.

The cognitive domain holds yet other areas of interest for comparing first and second language acquisition. Now we are going to analyze what may be the most complex, yet the most illuminating, perspective on age and acquisition: the affective domain.