TIMING AND ESL LEARNING IN YOUNG CHILDREN
Piaget (1946) believes time concepts are verbalized by about the age of four. To the developmental psychologist, time is "space in motion". The time concept involves the acquisition of a sense of past, present, and future, often expressed by such words as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Vikainen distinguishes among primary time (the experience of time), secondary time (the sense of duration and order), and tertiary time (which includes all time concepts and presupposes familiarity with the system of counting time).
Time is a "fundamental directional aspect of experience, based on direct experience of the protensity (duration) of sensation, and on experience of change from one sensory event, idea, or train of thought to another, and distinguishing in experience beginning, middle, and end, as well as past, present, and future" (Drever, 1952, p. 299).
Logically, generally, and ideally, the teaching and learning of linguistic forms in L2 should be dependent on their prior acquisition in L1 (which does not imply contrastive analysis or any comparison between L1 and L2 in the teaching/learning process). This is, by and large, the case for post-puberal learners. It is, more often than not, not the case with young children whose conceptual experience and cognitive acquisitions in L1 are more limited. Practically, then, it is quite often necessary to teach L2 forms which have no correspondents in L1 (Note, of course, that, to a lesser degree, this is also true of learners of any age). Indeed, the second language is highly likely to have forms which do not exist in L1. A case in point is the use of post verbal prepositions and agglutinations in English, such as get up, get out, get through, get into, get under, get for, get by, and fair play, togetherness, Picasso-like,--some of which may have neither structural nor conceptual equivalents in, say, Japanese. Again, however, the young child mus...