Motivate to Educate

This is a wonderful stuff with the main ideas that connect the learning of an L2 and motivational aspects. Enjoy it!

http://mariaeugenia871.googlepages.com/motivationandeducation

Piaget and Eagan

Till the moment, we have talked a lot about Vygotsky and Bruner, but it is important to pay special attention to the theories and findings of other remarkable authors when choosing an adequate course book to work with children attending their EPB cycle. One of those specialists is Piaget. He proposed a theory to show the different stages of cognitive development any human being go through in his life. They come to be known as: sensory-motor intelligence, pre-operational knowledge, concrete knowledge and abstract knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
The Canadian educator Kieran Eagan also describes human development but in terms of the characteristics that determine how the learner gains access to the world. He thinks of educational development as a process of accumulating and exercising layers of capacity for engaging with the world. As individual develop, they add new layers of sophistication. There are four layers: *the Mythic layer (4/5 to 9/10):Emotional categories have primary importance. Children want to know how to feel about whatever they are learning,simple binary opposite, for instance, the understanding of hot and cold precedes the concept of warm, the story form is the most powerful vehicle for instruction.* the Romantic layer (8/9 to 14/15):The key is in the search for the transcendent within reality. There is an outside world distinct and separate from the world within, The separate world is perceived as potentially threatening and alien. Children confront the task of developing a sense of their distinct identity.They seek out the limits of the real world. Material which deals with courage, nobility, genius, energy or creativity is potentially suitable for them.* the Philosophic layer (14/15 to 19/20): Students begin to understand the world as a unit, of which they are part. Focus in this layer is on the general laws by which the world works. * and the Ironic Layer (19/20 through adulthood): A major task is to control the capacities of all previous layers. If one scheme does not serve adequately, it is discarded and another is used instead

Food for Thought

“Great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities, but to make them.” Colton

More about Theme-based Teaching

What is important in this topic/theme-based learning situation and what deserves our attention is the scaffolding provided by the teacher. Let us remember that the one who coined that term was Bruner when talking about his famous LASS. That scaffolding can be either linguistic or cognitive and affective. The former is going to be characterized by a teacher who is going to start using the language the child does not know, but the he or she needs in order to solve some task or problem. So, little by little the child is going to “borrow” the patterns needed. If you pay attention to the micro-teaching lesson, the teacher, from the very beginning of the lesson, uses constrained and familiar activities, which provides systematicity for the child, that is, order. This is what Bruner refers to as “formats”, patterns extremely essential when teaching young learners. As it was suggested some meetings ago, this LASS or scaffolding makes the educator act as a fine-tuner of the language, helping the child till the moment he or she can participate without the help of the adult, thus moving into his/her ZPD.The cognitive and affective scaffolding is found in games and tasks which requires imagination –imagination is seen as games without action- Both are paramount during childhood. Why? From the age of three onwards, different situations appear in the child’s life that make him or her unable to satisfy his or her needs just by touching objects. This is the moment where imagination appears and he or she plays. She plays to be a mother, a teacher, etc., and these games have got rules, laws which are fundamental for the development of moral codes in him or her.

Theme-based Teaching

Theme-based teaching is an approach that provides the opportunity of dealing with different activities linked together by content. The theme connects everything you are going to work with. Surely, it is very demanding on teachers because when planning a good theme-based lesson plan, they must know about the cognitive development of children, the language they know and the way that language develops and the form motor skill development occurs at the ages the teacher in contact with.Theme-based teaching is also known as topic-based teaching or content-based teaching. The most profitable aspect in this approach is that it can be related to all the areas in the school curriculum. In consequence, as students are going to be using real language to talk about topic probably they already know something about; the approach is going to turn out to be absolutely communicative and meaningful.The language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse learnt from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of grammatical knowledge, together with elementary literacy skills. Early foreign language learning can be much more “organic” developing from partial to more complete knowledge by building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources.The planning is on-line, that is, it should be really flexible and open. Two basic planning tools for theme-based teaching are brainstorming and webs. In the first case, it is highly recommendable to take into consideration the following clues: find a theme and find the contents (people, objects, actions, processes, typical events and places) An alternative planning procedure is to build up web linking activities to areas of the school curriculum: Maths, Technology, etc., thus extending a mere lesson plan to a possible project work. Themes can include different aspects of the same topic requiring different types of discourse -graphs, charts, reports and commentaries-.

Food for Thought

“If the child is not learning the way you are teaching, then you must teach in the way the child learns.” Rita Dunn