Timing and ESL Learning in Young Children TIMING AND ESL LEARNING IN YOUNG CHILDREN T

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

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ellectual skills (such as individualized learning strategies), and a lesser corpus of knowledge, put them at a disadvantage as against adults. On the other hand, children do not risk much interference from previous knowledge, for the simple reason that they have but little such knowledge. Children are apt to be more open-minded than adults when it comes to change; they have no fossilized believes; to children, change is the stuff of growing. Children are often more highly motivated, because learning is central to their main occupation: growing. Hence, the importance of the child's play as a learning method. In this light, children are more plastic than adults, and the younger the child, the greater the plasticity. Note that this plasticity is essentially qualitative: it determines how change can occur, not how much; it affects the potential for acquiring (in the Krashen sense) new knowledge, particularly when it is perceived as play. Learning (in the Krashen sense), on the other hand, if it is perceived as not immediately related to the child's interest, is less effective in the young child than it is in the positively motivated life-experienced strategy-wise and goal-directed adult. One should note at this point that each year o
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Some common words found in the essay are:
L1 L2, English European, Learning Krashen, Maccoby Jacklin, L2 Japanese, Plastic Plasticity, Conclusions Timing, LEARNING CHILDREN, Henry Kissinger, Mommy Stage, language acquisition, jacklin 1974, introduction l2, l1 l2, language learning, native language, acquisition learning, acquisition l1, university press, teaching learning, timing introduction l2, comprehension expecting production, penfield roberts 1959, buffery gray 1972, klima bellugi 1966,
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Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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