Vintage Piaget – A fine old drop that gets better with time

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Vintage Piaget – A fine old drop that gets better with time

By:Jason D. Renshaw <webmaster@englishraven.com>

Theories About Young Learners and Language Learning (Part 1): Vintage Piaget – A fine old drop that gets better with time

Jason D. Renshaw

[Note: This article originally published September 2004 on the English Raven Online Journal for Language Teachers: http://www.englishraven.com/article_theory_piaget.html]

I. Introduction/Overview

Consider for a moment (if you will) the idea that putting together either a specific lesson or overall approach for language instruction to young learners is very much like planning a meal. Not just any meal, a meal you want your guests to enjoy, with just the right combination of flavors and textures. Well, in my opinion, any impressive meal needs to be complemented with the right wine! So in considering an approach for teaching language to young learners, let us assume that this ‘meal’ is going to taste better or worse depending on what wine we bring to the table to wash everything down with. Let’s go down into the cellar, shall we? Mmm, where is it – I seem to recall a good drop from a French-Swiss winemaker… Yes, here it is, Vintage Piaget! A solid wine with some basic ingredients made to last. Not a perfect drop, a little weak here and there around the edges, but certainly the basic flavor is going to complement our meal very well, as long as we drink it in small amounts at sufficient intervals. Good! Our meal is ready, it’s time to go in and teach some new language to kids. Wait! Have I chosen the right bottle? Someone told me not all Piagetian vintages are necessarily good. I’d better take a closer look at the label…

A couple of points need to be made here. I do not mean in any way to demean the overall practice of teaching language to young learners by insinuating it can be related to selecting the right alcohol before you step into a classroom! No, far from it. This is purely metaphorical, and through the example I am trying to illustrate how general background influences and beliefs can add or detract from the overall ‘flavor’ or appropriateness of the methods we take into our young learner classrooms. Secondly, it is perhaps more fitting to talk about Piaget the ‘winemaker’ rather than any particular ‘vintage’ he came up with, for it is in learning about the winemaker’s beliefs, ingredients and techniques (and let’s not forget it, his flaws) that we can get ideas on how to come up with our own ‘wines for the language learning table’. Thirdly, I have already hinted that some of Piaget’s theories are not entirely perfect in their application to a young learner language classroom. However, some of his key concepts are very solid and useful, and I for one have found them very enlightening in considering my own ‘approach-making’ process.

This article looks at Piaget and his theories in a sequence beginning with Piaget as a theorist (or ‘winemaker’ in his own right) in terms of what ideas he came up with and how. It then moves on to look at what I believe to be the two most influential theories to emerge in Piagetian philosophy: the concepts of stages of cognitive development and assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge. Finally, I conclude with some general notes about the importance of Piaget’s views in application to EFL instruction to young learners, and how we as ‘teachers/winemakers’ might benefit from them in coming up with our own approaches and techniques.

II. Piaget the ‘Winemaker’: A look at the man and his theories

Piaget was a French-Swiss psychologist/epistomologist. He was born in 1896 and died in 1980 whilst still directing the International Center for Genetic Epistemology, an institute he had founded in 1955. He had a long and very accomplished career, and received many prestigious awards for his work in child psychology and theories of cognitive development in children. It should be noted that Piaget’s observations and theories were not really targeted at language learning or development but at overall mental growth in general. To him, language was essentially just a representation of mental processes going on in the child’s mind, though his later work brought more focus to aspects of interaction and language ability.

One of Piaget’s earliest tasks was to standardize Cyril Burt’s intelligence/reasoning tests in application to Parisian children, something he found boring and never completed, however it did help to develop a strong interest for him in psychoanalysis and how intelligence could be observed and studied in developing children. He studied the intellectual development of his own three children from infancy beginning in the mid 1920s, and this along with studies of other children (especially when ‘at play’ or during interactions with adults) led to publication of some of his early ideas on the development of cognitive ability in children. Over his long career in developing ideas about child psychology, Piaget went on to study thousands of children, and is credited with the major development of relatively new scientific fields such as developmental psychology, cognitive theory and what came to be called genetic epistemology. He was also apparently the first major scientist to take child talk seriously, and his first and most major assertion was that children think in a way very different to the way adults think. One of his most famous statements about cognition in general was that "Intelligence is an adaptation…To say that intelligence is a particular instance of biological adaptation is thus to suppose that it is essentially an organization and that its function is to structure the universe just as the organism structures its immediate environment" (Piaget, 1963, pp. 3-4).

In watching and talking to young children, some of the things Piaget noted included the ideas of object permanence (knowing something is still present even if it has been hidden from view), stability of quantities despite changes in their physical appearance (the famous example of the same quantity of water presented in two different glasses, one of which is short and broad whereas the other is tall and thin), and logical inferencing - linking properties of objects to the way they act (for example, how the size, weight, and material of one ball affects how far it can be tossed or how high it bounces compared to another ball).

A key aspect of Piagetian psychology is the idea that cognitive development in young children stems from action and interaction with the world around them. This begins with physical (or ‘concrete’) objects in a problem-solving (“thinking something through”) sequence that is gradually internalized and develops the child’s thinking ability. In terms of how this related to language acquisition in children, Piaget basically saw language as a representative system, one of a variety of ‘symbol systems’ developed throughout childhood to represent new knowledge acquired as children engage in a physical way with aspects of their environments (Lightbown & Spada, 1999, p. 23).

Piaget is generally most widely known (especially in language learning circles) for his theories about “stages of cognitive development” and the concepts of “assimilation” and “accommodation” (see below), but to focus only on these aspects is to essentially ignore some of the other outstanding contributions he made to a general understanding of how experience and social interaction may develop cognitive ability and find representations in language. Piaget later went on from his early original theories to make observations about the way arguments amongst children are fundamental in the process of developing internalized reasoning skills, just as cooperation in child play can be a major factor in the development of moral judgment (Richard-Amato, 1996, p. 427). In many ways, his theories were seen as working from the idea that right-hemispheric brain activity (concentrated on action and motor skills) preceded left hemispheric brain activity (generally watching and learning until a sufficient amount has been absorbed that can then be converted into ‘language’), a notion which James Asher reiterates as one of the founding principles of his world famous Total Physical Response (TPR) method (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p. 75). By 1965, some of his theories had evolved to the point that they were considered to be from the same theoretical viewpoint as Vygotsky’s in terms of the central role they allocated to social interaction in language learning, and have even been considered fundamental in the growth of relatively contemporary notions such as Cooperative Language Learning (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p. 194).

Piaget is also well known for his famous debate with the so-called “Father of Linguistics” in Chomsky, in which he argued that language basically represented or expressed a skill of symbolic representation gradually acquired through stages of cognitive development. This view was in contrast to Chomsky’s theories about ‘Universal Grammar’: that a general mechanism in the brain (acquired genetically) accounted for humans’ ability to acquire language, which he saw as being far too complex and distinctive to be acquired simply through experience and general cognitive processes (Mitchell & Myles, 2001, p. 17).

III. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

One of Piaget’s central theories was that growth and development of mental skills and knowledge in children necessarily went through a series of defined stages that eventually develop into the ability to engage in formal logical thinking about abstract concepts, a final stage generally believed to be inaccessible to children before the age of about 11. He noted four stages of cognitive development: (1) Sensorimotor; (2) Preoperational; (3) Concrete Operational; and (4) Formal Operational.

He also identified characteristics for these stages, and it these that have drawn the most criticism from others in the field of cognitive development in children. Among the characteristics he identified, he asserted that these stages did not vary in their sequence, they were universal (and therefore not culturally specific), the stages and characteristics were generalizable to other functions, each stage represented a logically organized ‘whole’, and the stage sequences were hierarchical (with each stage incorporating elements from earlier stages to become more differentiated and integrated).

Donaldson (1978) cast the most serious doubts on Piaget’s theories of ‘stages’ and the ability to apply “logical” or “abstract” thought processes before the age of 11 through a series of well-documented experiments that showed fairly convincingly that Piaget’s own experiments were either unreliable or not particularly suited to children in terms of showing what they could or couldn’t do mentally. An overemphasis on the Piagetian way of “thinking about thinking” is often cited when criticizing educational theories or programs that try to tell learners what stage they are at, and therefore what kind of instruction they need. It is also blamed for overly ‘part-based’ approaches (parts selected according to what stage children are at and can presumably handle, based on the idea that maturation precedes learning and governs over a sort of “readiness” principle – Richard-Amato, 1996, p. 38) as opposed to more ‘holistic’ views of experience and learning. As Cameron points out:

An example of how stage theory can lead to restricting children’s learning occurred in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before children were allowed to start writing sentences, they had to complete sets of ‘writing readiness’ activities that worked on part-skills. In spending so long on writing patterns and bits of letter shapes, they were missing out on the more holistic experiences that also help children understand the purposes of writing as communication. (Cameron, 2001, p. 4).

So, generally speaking, it could be said that the majority of modern ELT theorists might prefer to leave this particular Piaget vintage in the cellar, saying that it does not make a good accompaniment to ‘language learning meals’ for young learners. However (as I point out in section V below), it is surprising how fixed this view of language learning stages has become in many contexts, yet in my view it can be too dismissive to completely ignore the possible benefits it can have for general planning considerations for language programs.

IV. Piaget’s Activity Leading to ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Accommodation’ Theory

Piaget quite early on came up with a general theory about how physical activity and the associated experience interacting with one’s environment leads to mental growth:

Intelligence is assimilation to the extent that it incorporates all the given data of experience within its framework…There can be no doubt either, that mental life is also accommodation to the environment. Assimilation can never be pure because by incorporating new elements into its earlier schemata the intelligence constantly modifies the latter in order to adjust them to new elements. (Piaget, 1963, p. 6-7).

Well, that might seem a bit wordy and mind-bending at this stage, so let’s look at it another way. The way new information is found and utilized is considered to be a conceptual model (or ‘schema’). Activity can lead to mental development through two means: ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’. Assimilation basically involves an action whereby the child does not actually “change” his or her knowledge, just reapplies the same action in different circumstances (making information ‘fit’ an existing schema, as it were). Accommodation, on the other hand, indicates that some kind of alteration or adjustment of the knowledge occurrs, as a result of interaction with new things present (altering an existing schema to accommodate new information) in the environment.

Take as an example a child who has already fathomed that tapping or hitting a toy ball will cause it to move. The child may then employ the same action to make something else (let’s say a toy car) move, in which case we have an example of assimilation – the child’s knowledge on how to make something move has not essentially changed, it has just been applied to a new object in the child’s environment. On the other hand, let’s imagine that the child stops ‘tapping’ the toy car to make it move, and actually places his or her hand on it to either drag or push it along (in the process enabling the child to control the speed of the movement or to ‘steer’ the car in a particular direction). In this case, we are seeing accommodation as the child sees a new possibility and creates new knowledge for him/herself. As we can see from this example, both assimilation and accommodation happen together, and while they begin as general behavior in interaction with the physical environment, eventually they become active thought processes.

The important things to take note of here are that children actively construct new knowledge from themselves, basically by “doing”. When they have figured out one way of “doing” they are likely to try and reapply that action with other objects in their environment. In adapting the action and coming up with a more satisfactory result of some kind, they learn a new way of “doing.” The overall experience involved in this process gradually enters the child’s mind as a thought process, which in turn enhances the child’s cognitive development.

Both concepts (assimilation and accommodation) appear to have important links with language learning. We can often see young learners play and experiment with language, sometimes by applying knowledge they already have to a new ‘object’ in the language (for example, realizing that past tense involves a “-ed” sound, which many children typically over-generalize and apply to all verbs in past tense whether they are ‘regular’ or ‘irregular’, producing such utterances as “she runned”), whereas at other times they experiment and adapt to try out a new thought on how the language works (for example, eventually coming up with “ran” and then accommodating the new knowledge into their language system). Where it gets a little confusing is in terms of Piaget’s original theory being mainly applicable to physical objects in a physical environment, whereas for language learning theorists the concepts of assimilation and accommodation appear to refer to activity that is conceptually more abstract (basically, the development of learners’ interlanguage through the key acts of over-generalizing or restructuring), even if the act of speaking is a real physical act and the outcome of a speaking action may yield “physical” results.

On a lighter note, it can be amusing to see just how well Piaget’s assimilate/accommodate model stands up even well beyond childhood. Consider men and their general well-known lack of ability to come up with effective dating lines. I think most women would agree that in the majority of these cases they are seeing ‘assimilation’ more than ‘accommodation’ in the social skills of the men who ask them out!

Thus, it would be fair to say that the Piagetian theory of assimilation and accommodation is generally a much more welcome and popular vintage for the language-learning table compared to the theory about stages of cognitive development. Perhaps that was the particular bottle label I should have been looking for in my introduction to this article, rather than rushing down into the cellar and just grabbing any Piaget vintage willy-nilly…

V. Piagetian Theory and Implications for Foreign Language Learning

By way of conclusion, and before we consider practical language learning implications, I think it is important to reiterate and explain five important things about Piaget as a theorist and child developmental psychologist.

For one, he originally believed that the ability to take action to solve some sort of problem presented by the environment was neither innate nor a process of imitation – the child takes the action from the outset and through the experience acquires new mental knowledge.

The second well-known characteristic of early Piagetian psychology was that first language development did not play anywhere near as much a role in children’s mental growth as did the key concept of taking action and learning from it. One of Piaget’s earliest works in this field, Language and thought of the child (1926), focused on theories of speech acts, but mainly in terms of how a child’s speech reflected (rather than influenced) his or her growing mental capacity (Riley, 1996, p. 127-128).

The third consideration is that his original theories almost completely neglected any consideration for social influences on children’s learning and cognitive development, and focused instead on biological factors as determining his famous “universal stages of development” theory. This also has implications for differences between his theories and those of Vygotsky (“Zone of Proximal Development”) and Krashen (“i+1”). Piaget’s views on cognitive development are generally held to have been centered on a single level, whereas Vygotsky’s and Krashen’s worked on two levels – “an actual level and a potential level” (Richard-Amato, 1996, p. 58).

Fourth, Piaget essentially saw the concepts of “learning” and “mental development” as separate from each other, that “learning utilizes development but does not shape its course” (Richard-Amato, 1996, p. 38).

Finally, something many theorists (mostly those who had found a reason to criticize him) like to conveniently overlook is the fact that Piaget’s theories changed considerably over time. Whereas his early ideas are used as a direct contrast to Vygotsky’s (whose work he appeared to be unaware of at the time), by the sixties in many ways the theories Piaget was expressing were remarkably similar and had begun to focus a lot more on social factors in explaining cognitive development in children.

Despite his many critics, Piaget’s views on mental development in children have important implications for concepts in language learning. The first is the idea that children try to make sense of the environment they find themselves in and actively seek to manipulate ideas and concepts, creating new knowledge for themselves as they go through this process and using these experiences to negotiate new situations and problems. The second important idea is the importance of a child’s environment in terms of affecting the number and type of opportunities available to apply or adapt new knowledge systems. On the first score, it needs to be acknowledged that what children have already experienced or know how to do with language is likely to have an effect on how they tackle the next ‘language problem’ to come their way, and that most children characteristically and instinctively want to find new solutions to new problems. In terms of the environment, something like a classroom in the middle of an EFL context affords very different (and let’s face it, much more limited) opportunities to see the need for and try out new language than a natural environment where everything around them operates in the target language they are trying to learn.

On the other hand, there is the tricky issue of those “universal stages of development” – a concept that, despite modern critics, has shown amazing tenacity in many language-teaching contexts and not always for the right reasons. For myself, teaching in a private language institute for Korean young learners five years ago, I vividly remember an incident where a Korean supervisor verbally boxed my ears in front of a room full of other teachers for daring to go ahead and help my children use past tense forms in their regular communication with me about things they’d done the day before or over the weekend. What infuriated her was the fact that “past tense” was not due to be covered on the syllabus for at least another six months, and that I was being irresponsible by “teaching them grammar that they can’t understand yet.” When I protested about the communicative context that had come up, she told me quite sternly to speak to them and accept answers only in the present tense, irrespective of whether it fit the situation or not, because “that’s what they know how to do right now.” Needless to say, her reasoning was ridiculous, and I went ahead and used and accepted past tense whenever it seemed appropriate in classroom conversation. However, I hope that example illustrates what I mean about some contexts and curriculum programmers still believing in developmental stages almost religiously.

Despite that, I actually think the concept of developmental stages can be useful, especially in planning a language program with its associated notions, topics, materials and activities – so long as an allowance is made for a sort of ‘open-ended adaptability’ that provides opportunities for teachers and learners to branch out and explore other aspects of language if or as they come up.

To wrap it all up, here’s what I think Piaget’s wine can bring to your language-learning ‘dinner’ for young learners:

[1] Remember that adults and children tend to think and perceive things differently, which is not to say that children are not capable of logical and/or abstract thinking – just because the children do not appear to understand something you say, do or perceive is not justification for assuming they are not capable of understanding it;

[2] Piaget’s Stages of Development can tentatively serve as a model for curriculum or activity design (focusing perhaps more on ‘how’ something is taught rather than ‘what’ is taught), but use them only as a starting point and don’t let them become a straight-jacket that prevents opportunities for exploring the language or methods as they arise naturally in the classroom;

[3] Make a learning ‘environment’ as rich as possible in terms of providing new things to think or talk about (posters, realia, etc) – remember that children instinctively want to find out new things and are capable of constructing new knowledge about language for themselves based on trial-and-error, but without a suitable environment this instinct becomes diminished;

[4] Remember what assimilation and accommodation mean and involve, including the fact that they are interrelated when it comes to children’s learning – when children’s overgeneralization of a language rule results in a non-target form, see it as an important first step in finding and accommodating new language, not as an ‘error’ that needs to be jumped on immediately for correction;

[5] Recall that Piaget’s best known theories generally neglect social factors in learning and work from the idea of a child finding new knowledge independently – combining his theory with Vygotsky’s notion of ‘social scaffolding’ and Bruner’s notions of ‘routines and formats’ can create an extremely effective method for helping young learners acquire new language.

Piaget had (and continues to have) a major impact on our general understanding of the way children think and interact with and within their environment. This article has gone into depth about Piaget's best known theories and what they may imply for language learning and a foreign language classroom for young learners. Not everything Piaget had to say turns into gold for a language teacher, but there are certainly gems to be picked out of his work that can help YL language instructors get a better idea of what to bring to their classrooms, how to deliver it, and how the students themselves may grasp and interact with it.

Bon Appetit!