1. Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development
Piaget’s work showed that children are born with a very basic genetically inherited mental structure that evolves and is the foundation for all subsequent learning and knowledge.

2. Piaget Cognitive development psychology Observed his own children
A child learns by doing
mental processes such as perceiving, remembering, believing, and reasoning.
Cumulative: understanding a new experience grows out of a previous learning experience
Piaget’s theory –
children think in considerably different ways than adults do
There are three elements to Piaget’s theory:
Schema
The four processes that enable the transition from one stage to another
The four stages of cognitive development

3. Piaget’s four stages of learning
Sensory-Motor Stage
Preoperational stage
Stage of Concrete Operations
Stage of Formal Operations
The later stages evolve from and are built on earlier ones.
They point out that the sequence of stages is fixed and unchangeable and children cannot skip a stage.
At each stage, the child will acquire more complex motor skills and cognitive abilities

4. Transition from one stage to another
at each stage there are definite accompanying developmental changes in the areas of play, language, morality, space, time, and number (Singer & Revenson, 1997).
- School years?! And levels?
The Four Processes:
The four processes that enable the transition from one cognitive stage to another are: 
assimilation, accommodation, disequilibrium, and equilibration.

5. Sensory-Motor (Ages Birth Through Two)

6. Preoperational (Ages Two Through Seven)
Cannot think in a logical way
Their interpretation of symbols
Selfish – about objects
Their own perspective
Curious and investigating
Make up explanations – imagination
They think differently from adults
They distinguish between reality and imagination
Learn several words a day (nine)
A few thousand words – a thousand a year
Strong memory and careful with promises
They can invent excuses
socialize

7. Concrete Operations (Ages Seven Through Eleven)

8. Formal Operations (Ages Eleven Through Sixteen)
Deal with present (the here and now)
Start thinking about the future and abstract
Beginning of adolescence
Start of abstract thought and deductive reasoning
Their thinking is more flexible, rational and systematic
Possible ways of solving a problem
Development of inner value system and sense of moral judgment.

9. Deal with the present (the here and now)
Start thinking about the future, abstract and the hypothetical
Beginning of Adolescence
Start of abstract thought and Deductive reasoning
Their thinking is more flexible, rational and systematic
Possible ways of solving a problem on different ways
Development of inner value system and the sense of Moral Judgment

10. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
March 2015

11. Language learning in early childhood
First sounds, vocals, babbling, gurgling, ..
From sounds to complex grammatical language
Developmental sequences – from sounds and auditory discrimination (pa – ba)
Discriminate sounds with phonemic character
In the beginning all sounds – than specific sounds of the language of the surrounding
12 months a couple of common words – 24 months produce 50 different words and simple telegraphic sentences

12. Language learning in early childhood – cont.
Language acquisition stages in line with the cognitive development stages
An experiment with grammatical morphemes (ing, ‘s, ‘s, ed, is, be)
Individual plus a learning pattern down-up
Wugs and boded (generalization not just imitate and memorise) – artificial words and grammatical forms
Stages:
negation, (stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …)
questions (stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …) what, where, who, why, (questions for discussion), when (past and future – later) and how

13. Age of four
More or less grammatical forms and structures spoken to them
Stories about imaginary characters
Inner speech
Several words a day
Aggressive for protection and cajoling for winning
Metalinguistic (words and meaning)
~ 20,000 hours of learning
School setting – new ways of learning

14. The school years Reading a major boost to metalinguistic awareness
Language: form (words) and meaning
Several hundred to a thousand words a year
Various text types increases vocabulary
Narrative (imagination) – non-fiction (academic)

15. Behaviourist perspective
Imitate and practice
Positive reinforcement on things heard and repeated
Imitation % sometimes even less – does not explain development of language
Not like a parrot – who keeps imitating but going beyond
Something more inside the child – not only imitating environment
Patterns of language (putted) and focus on meaning (propose a Toast)
Imitate not enough – imitate and generalize

16. Innatist
Children biologically programmed for languages (like walking, and growing)
Universal grammar
Innate ability – for grammatical structures
Different vocabulary, creativity, social grace etc, but the same grammatical structures.
Genes ?
Critical period Hypothesis (CPH) isolated children Victor – Gennie
International adoptees – understand with some slight accent

17. Interactionist – constructivist?