Class Preparation

Throughout Piaget's theory, teachers must become aware about why the learner’s age is so important in the acquisition of the second language, as Charles says in his article Age-Related Factors in Second Language Acquisition, although is difficult to define in which age are easier or harder learn a second language he argues that there are psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories and researches which propose possible explanations for age-related influences on language acquisition that language educators should take into account.(Charles, 1981.)

Teachers must think on the stages proposed by Piaget in order to choose better their topics, methods and activities. Therefore if a teacher has a one to two year students group, she or he should create an appropriate program for them, for example: this group is in the sensorimotor stage for that reason according to Piaget at this stage the child can internalize symbols by imitating and repeating; thus, it is the opportunity to teach vocabulary related to topics such as the family, the house etc; moreover at this stage Piaget (1954/1981) postulated that children learn best when afforded opportunities to interact with their environments; so, it is important to promote the interaction with their parents, we as teachers can help, the more children interact with their parents while completing school assignments, the more likely they are to experience success. (Battle, 2003).

ACCORDING TO EACH STAGE.

In the preoperational stage Piaget established some processes in which the child goes through, at this stage the teacher should stimulate the imagination one of the process stipulated by Piaget is Symbolic functioning in this process the child uses words or pictures to represent something which is not physically present; as a result, it is suitable the use of flashcards to create association among words, pictures and pronunciation.

Another process explained by Piaget is called egocentrism; this process indicates an inclination of a child to only think from her or his own point of view and also, the inability of a child to take the point of view of others, subsequently at this stage, it would be unsuitable to think as a teacher in an activity in which the children have to share ideas and conclude objectively about something.

Piaget also state other processes denominated Seriation and another called classification which occurs in the preoperational stage as well; these involve the ability to arrange objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristic, moreover; the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to their characteristics, including the idea that one set of objects can include another. For this reason the teacher should take into account that this is an appropriate stage to teach topics like shapes, colors, geometric figures, contrasts between measures, etc.

The Concrete operational stage is the third of four stages of cognitive development in Piaget's theory. This stage is characterized by the appropriate use of logic, and the teacher should become aware about some important processes which occur during this stage.

One of them is called Decentering and another is Reversibility, according to Piaget in these processes the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it, moreover the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, and then returned to their original state. It means that is suitable to introduce topics like color combination which generates other colors, or mathematics operations.

In addition to those processes Piaget points that at this stage takes place the elimination of Egocentrism, thus the children are ready to think critically and objectively taking into account other’s view points, finally she or he understand that not everyone has the same perspective of the situation. (Tudge, 1989).

The formal operational stage is the fourth and final of the stages of cognitive development of Piaget's theory. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult functions in a cognitively normal manner and therefore is able to understand such things as love, "shades of gray", and values. Lucidly, biological factors may be traced to this stage as it occurs during puberty and marking the entry to adulthood in Physiology, cognition, moral judgments (Kohlberg), Psychosexual development (Freud), and social development (Erikson). Finally at this stage the learner has had a complete process in which she or he has learnt enough vocabulary and some grammatical structures, and her or his mind is more capable to understand better grammatical structures and at the same time, she or he will be more interested on understand the syntactic and linguistic process that occur in the acquisition of the second language.