tion?
It is axiomatic in education to say that the teaching/learning process should start "where the child is." So, clearly, our first task as educators is to find out the potential level of acquisition, given a variety of factors which constitute the input--such as maturational level, intellectual level, affective receptivity, and home and school environmental conditions which foster or impede learning. Psychologists by and large agree that there are critical ages for learning certain patterns of behavior. The young child acquires linguistic and related communicative skills (such as body-language and ethnocentric behaviors) readily--by osmosis, as it were--without formal learning of the cognitive aspects of language. "Around age 12, cognitive development (Piaget's formal operations) involves a meta-awareness of thoughts and behavior and contributes to psychological feelings of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and reluctance in revealing self, which may disturb the language acquisition potential" (Krashen, 1979,
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