The majority of teaching materials in Taiwanese language curriculum for
children are folk rhymes, proverbs, folk-say, traditional fairy tales and tongue twisters. The contents of lessons are often restricted due to children’s very limited literacy of Han characters. Comprehensive Taiwanese curriculum helping children to develop real-life applications of basic skills and cognition is not currently available. Piaget’s theories of cognitive development have been applied broadly to children’s curriculum in Western countries. It is considered to be very important in developing workbooks at levels relevant to children’s cognitive functioning during different stages of development.
To enrich and improve the current methods and materials of Taiwanese language
teaching, we apply Piaget’s theories in comprehensive and integrated lessons of
cognitive capabilities for children at the concrete operational stage, which will help children learn not only Taiwanese-speaking but cognitive abilities. We found that alphabetic writing system solves the problem that the contents of character-based curriculum are incompatible with children’s language ability and cognitive functions. A standard system of Taiwanese Romanization is needed urgently as the orthography to design the comprehensive Taiwanese curriculum for Taiwanese children.
Introduction:
After introducing new 9-year (elementary and secondary)education curriculum in 2001, Taiwanese languages became the formal lectures at primary and junior high school. Teaching materials in Taiwanese language curriculum for children have been developed since then and the majority are folk rhymes, proverbs, folk-say, traditional fairy tales, Ke CL, Cheng ST tongue twisters), puzzles, jokes, and short articles. Appreciative topics and contents that extend to the knowledge of local environment, animals and flora, history, culture and customs have been introduced to children’s Taiwanese curriculum and help children establish their Taiwanese identity.
However, teaching materials in Taiwanese language curriculum are rarely designed to provide activities to enhance children’s critical and creative thinking skills. Most Taiwanese language lectures focused on phonics and request children to recite poems, rhymes or short articles. Cognitive theories-based comprehensive curriculum helping children to develop real-life applications of basic skills and cognition has been applied broadly to children’s curriculum in Western countries, but is not currently available among Taiwanese curriculum.
The contents of Taiwanese lessons are often restricted due to children’s very
limited literacy in Han characters and are not relevant to children’s language ability and real-life experience. In addition, character-based writing system lacks the abstract features of alphabetic writing that model the thought processes necessary for scientific creativity. Current contents of majority of teaching materials and character-based orthographies impede the development of workbooks at levels relevant to children’s cognitive functioning during different stages of development and could not provide activities to enhance children’s cognitive abilities.
To enrich and improve the current methods and materials of Taiwanese language
teaching, we apply Piaget’s theories of cognitive development in the Taiwanese
curriculum for children and design a new curriculum which will help children learn
not only Taiwanese-speaking but cognitive development.
Materials and Methods:
We review the Piaget’s theories of child development and available children’s
workbooks and curriculum in English at each grade.
In the 1950s, Jean Piaget (1896-1980), one of the most influential researchers in
the area of developmental psychology during the 20th century, began publishing
his theories about the sequential development of cognition in children from infancy
into adolescence. He emphasized the ways that children think and acquire knowledge
and described 4 major stages of cognitive maturation and development, leading to the
capacity for adult thought. The 4 stages are the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2
years), the preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7 years), the concrete operational stage
(ages 7 to 11 years) and the formal operational stage (ages 11 years through the end of adolescence).
Piaget used the term sensorimotor to describe the first stage: Infants begin to
learn through sensory observation and gain control of their motor function. They
learn to differentiate themselves from objects. The critical achievement of this period is the development of object permanence at about 7 to 12 months of age. Infants are able to maintain a mental image and realize that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense. Some symbolic abilities and words use are developed at the end of this stage.
During the preoperational stage, children use language and symbols more extensively than in the sensorimotor stage. They are unable to think logically or deductively and have difficulty taking the viewpoint of others (egocentric thinking). Children at the end of this stage classify objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of color.
The concrete operational stage is so named because in this period children
operate and act on the concrete, real, and perceivable world of objects and events, not about abstract phenomena. Children in this stage begin to deal with a wild array of information outside. Intelligence is demonstrated through logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects and events. They have a new ability to classify objects according to their logical similarities or
differences and are able to serialize, order, and group objects in classes on the basis of common characteristics. They also develop more complex categories to classify objects according to several features and order them in series along a single dimension such as size and begin to understand the concept of reversibility and conservation of quantity and number. This stage was characterized by 7 types of conservation: number, length, liquid, mass,weight, area, and volume. To prove the feasibility of theories-based Taiwanese language curriculum, we apply Piaget’s theories in comprehensive and integrated lessons of cognitivecapabilities for the children at the concrete operational stage (age of 7 to 11 years).
Results :
Piaget’s theories-based Taiwanese language curriculum for children are demonstrated and sequenced by the levels of successive cognitive development. These teaching materials help children at the concrete operational stage develop the basic thinking skills of similarity, difference, categorizing, deduction,sequencing, inference, and problem solving and addition.
Conclusions :
In keeping up with global trend and the theories of cognitive development, comprehensive Taiwanese curriculum at levels relevant to children’s cognitive functioning, which helps children develop not only Taiwanese-speaking but cognitive abilities is needed urgently. Taiwanese language curriculum should play the role in enhancing children’s Taiwanese language ability at service of cognitive processing. Character-based orthography limits the contents of curriculum and curbs children’s intelligence. Current Han-character writing system in Taiwan makes it difficult to develop workbooks relevant to children’s language ability and cognitive development. We strongly suggest the Government to establish a standard system of Taiwanese
Romanization as the orthography to design the comprehensive Taiwanese curriculum for our children, the future masters of Taiwan.
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