Teaching Languages to Young Learners

These vocabulary flashcards define key pedagogical and psychological concepts related to teaching foreign languages to young learners, based on the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner as well as specific task and assessment analysis framework.

Assimilation

A Piagetian adaptive process where an action takes place in response to the environment without any change to the child's existing skills or knowledge.

Accommodation

A Piagetian process where a child adjusts their actions or knowledge to adapt to new environmental possibilities, leading to the reorganization of mental representations.

Private Speech

The phenomenon where young children talk to themselves to organize and regulate their own behavior during tasks or play.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

A Vygotskyan concept representing the difference between what a child can achieve alone and what they can achieve with skilled help or mediation.

Internalisation

The process described by Vygotsky where interpersonal joint talk and activity are transformed into intrapersonal mental action by the individual.

Scaffolding

Talk that supports a child in carrying out an activity, which is fine-tuned to the learner's needs and adjusted as they become more competent.

Routines

Classroom events that happen every day in a familiar form, providing a space for language growth by allowing children to predict meaning and intentions.

The Critical Period Hypothesis

The theory that young children can learn a second language particularly effectively before puberty because their brains can still utilize mechanisms from first language acquisition.

Competition Model

A theory of linguistic performance explaining how a person's first language cues for interpreting meaning influence their development of a second or foreign language.

Cognitive Demands

Task requirements related to concepts, world knowledge, and the degree of contextualization of the language used.

Task-as-plan

The intended design or framework of a classroom activity as prepared by the teacher before implementation.

Task-in-action

The actual event and language use that occur when a planned classroom activity is implemented with specific learners.

Discourse Event

A naturally bounded use of language of any length, considered within its context of use and the users involved.

Formulaic Sequences

Chains or 'chunks' of language that are learned or produced as whole units rather than being constructed word by word.

Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic Shift

A developmental change between ages five and ten where children shift from associating words by thematic links (different word classes) to associating them by category (the same word class).

Basic Level Words

Words for concepts in the middle of a specific-to-general hierarchy that are learned easiest by children because they represent similar shapes and physical uses.

Sense Relations

The various ways content word meanings relate to each other, including antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy.

Morpheme

A visual unit of written language that carries grammatical meaning through its form, such as adding '-ed' to a verb to indicate the past.

Phonological Awareness

The ability to hear and identify the sounds, rimes, and syllables that make up spoken words, which is highly correlated with reading success.

Grapho-phonemic Relationships

The links between written symbols (letters) and the sounds they represent when spoken.

Emergent Literacy

The process where children gradually work out the patterns linking spoken and written text through exposure to reading without formal instruction.

Washback

The impact that assessment and testing practices have on individual learners, teachers, and the classroom curriculum.

Formative Assessment

Assessment intended to inform on-going teaching and learning by providing immediate feedback on student progress.

Validity

The measure of how effectively an assessment evaluates what it actually claims to assess.

Reliability

The consistency of an assessment, or whether it would produce the same results if taken by the same pupils on different occasions.