The importance of Piaget´s framework for second language teaching

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The importance of Piaget´s framework for second language teaching

Piaget’s ideas, new and revolutionary, changed the previous conception of psychology: behaviorism; a scientific worldwide theory which said that humans only assimilate information by stimulus.

Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher, never proposed rules about how to intervene in education or how to teach a second language. However, his research on mental development in children has had important implications in language teaching. Explaining that children do not just store information, Piaget provided coherence to his cognitive development perspective. Children process information and create their knowledge while touching and feeling; young learners, active and motivated, construct their own knowledge (schema).

Piaget explained that children try to make sense of the environment they are inserted in; ideas and concepts are manipulated by them in order to create new knowledge. As they go through this process, they use these experiences to manage new situations and problems. This is really important because children need the chance to experiment—especially in the classroom.

He also made proposed a completely new perspective: children’s mind works differently from adult’s mind. Piaget argued that there are four universal stages of development that all children pass through, as a result of their biological development. These universal stages are: Sensorimotor stage, Preoperational stage, Concrete operations stage and Formal operations stage.

The teacher should create tasks that will give students the opportunity to practice activities, as well as different thinking operations appropriate to each stage. He should decide ‘how to teach’ first and then, ‘what to teach’ according to each age or, in Piaget’s words, according to each cognitive development stage.

Piaget’s research resulted to be relevant for second language teaching. As I said before, and despite the various critics, he proposed a clear system of ideas about the child’s cognitive development—something that even nowadays is useful. A teacher must implement a method which should be based upon a selected approach and according to the specific stage the child is passing through.

Piaget’s stages can tentatively be a useful tool or even work as a model for curriculum design. For instance, in the Preoperational Stage when children begin schooling, they are not yet able to think abstractly and need concrete physical situations to learn. I have experienced that during my days as a teacher assistant; children’s mind tangled and confused about the use of new grammar and vocabulary is a real issue in ESL classrooms. However, they found easier learning new English through a game instead of simple written instruction or examples. As Piaget mentions “a child is not satisfied with speaking; he must needs ‘play out’ what he thinks and symbolize his ideas by means of gestures or objects, and represent things by imitation, drawing and construction.”

"Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society...but for me and no one else, education means making creators....You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists." (Bringuier, 1980, p. 132)