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Teach English in Longwang Zhen - Ankang Shi

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- Ekaterina Shipacheva, 9/10/2018 Although in everyday life people tend to disregard a phenomenon such as child development viewing it as the most ordinary and natural process that happens to every single person in early stages of their lives; however, child development, in fact, presents a great field for many researches. First of all, what is child development? According to Wikipedia, “Child development entails the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the end of adolescence, as the individual progresses from dependency to increasing autonomy”. Now we are going to look at the definition more thoroughly. As we see, child development encompasses three levels of changes - biological, psychological and emotional, and although, we can observe same patterns on all three levels in the majority of human beings we must keep in mind that at the same time it is a unique process. The factors that influence child development include almost everything from everyday life: it may be diseases, illnesses or diet that can affect biological development of a child; it may be family conditions, social environment or psychological traumas that can affect emotional and psychological development. More about these factors we can find in works written by Urie Bronfenbrenner who developed ecological systems theory and divided all factors that may influence child development into 5 systems: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. Obviously, to ensure children’s normal development is of high importance as becoming a healthy, emotionally stable adult is the key to the healthier society. That is the reason why nowadays, we are fortunate to have people who are profoundly interested in developing theories and studies, conducting researches and experiments, working out programs and courses to increase knowledge on and improve the quality of child development. Since the contribution made in this field is enormous, we decided to look through only those ones which are connected to English teaching and education in general since it can give clues on how to teach children best according to the stage of their development. The contributors in these spheres, to name a few, are Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Erik Erikson, John B. Watson, Burrhus Skinner, Maria Montessori and others. The work of Jean Piaget is considered to be one of most influential works in the field. Piaget developed the theory of cognitive development according to which every child during their first years of life goes through several stages of development, such as sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal operations stages. Children going through different stages may be characterized by possessing different abilities and ways of thinking. Getting familiar with this theory, a teacher may improve their teaching skills as they will possess more knowledge on children psychology and way of thinking, which, in other words, simply means better understanding of students and their problems. Another great contributor in the studies of child development is Lev Vygotsky whose most popular idea is “scaffolding”. What is implied by this term? According to Vygotsky, teaching is a process in which a teacher expands already existing knowledge of their students. The key of scaffolding is that teachers, or parents, help children learn only by providing them with new knowledge or skills. That theory is especially important for teachers as it makes clear that a teaching process will be much more efficient in case teachers provide suitable lesson content depending on students’ abilities. The last contributor we look at in this essay is Erik Erikson who, as in case with J. Piaget, stated that every person in their life goes through certain stages which are distinguished on the basis of a certain task. There are 8 sets of so-called tasks that were described by Erik Erikson, they are trust vs mistrust for infant, autonomy vs shame for toddlerhood, initiative vs guilt for preschooler, industry vs inferiority for young adolescent, identity vs role confusion for adolescent, intimacy vs isolation for young adulthood, generativity vs stagnation for middle adulthood and ego integrity vs despair for old age.Understanding of this theory might also be very helpful for a teacher to interpret the needs and problems of their students better. Even though we named only a few names of the great contributors in the field of child development we strongly belief that the more works on the subject a teacher is familiar with the easier it is for a teacher to improve their teaching skills and make the learning process more efficient and entertaining.


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