Bilingual and Multilingual Development

Language Teaching Approaches Tailored to the Perceptual Mechanisms of Bilingual Students

Overview

• Bilingual and Multilingual Development 
• Copyright © Edizioni La Creazione 2012
  
• Published online 1 September 2012

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the way students learn a foreign language or two similar languages ​​simultaneously within the same classroom based on their stages of development and on perceptual mechanisms that may develop in similar teaching approaches.

In the beginning, the definition of Evolutionary Psychology is given, while the impact of Piaget's theory in modern pedagogy is being analyzed. Also, the stages of child development based on sectors “physical-kinetic”, “cognitive”, “linguistic”, “emotional and social development” are described.  Then, the development of perceptual skills since infancy is described. At the end of this chapter, we review the approaches to teaching foreign languages ​​while bilingual education in the stages of child development is being described. Furthermore, the conditions for learning and teaching approaches that apply to each stage of development are being explored. Moreover, the field of Evolutionary Psychology, the developmental stages of children and their perceptual skills development, the approaches that have been implemented so far and the area of bilingual education in stages of development are described and analysed. In addition, the conditions for learning foreign languages ​​in the four development stages and the language teaching approaches to be used for each stage of child development and reached the following conclusions are investigated.