b. Students` cognitive growth
As the human being develops, the cognitive also grows. There are some basic considerations of teaching English in the elementary school
connected to their cognitive growth. The cognitive growth involved in child’s developmental stages. Piaget`s work 1954, as quoted in
Sprinthall Sprinthall 1987: 94-101, provides four major stages of cognitive growth.
1 Sensorimotor 0-2 years
The major intellectual activity of the stage is the interaction of the senses in the environment. What and how the child learns will
remain an immediate experience, as vivid as any first experience. It would be fair to say that learning in the sensorimotor stage is a
continuous peak experience. One final point: babies during this stage are primarily learning through their senses and are most
strongly affected by their immediate environment. 2
Pre-operational 2-7 years Children are no longer bound to their immediate sensory
environment. They started to develop some mental images in the preceding stage object permanence, for example, and in this stage
they expand that ability by leaps and bounds. The predominant learning mode at this stage is intuitive; preoperational children are
not overly concerned with precision but delight in imitating sounds and trying out lots of different words. The intuitive period is truly a
golden opportunity for facilitating language development. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
3 Concrete operation 7-11 years
In the operational stage, they are young logical positivists who understand functional relationships because they are specific,
because they can test the problems out. During the concrete stage children exhibit some fragile ability to reason abstractly, especially
when the learning task is simplified. 4
Formal operation 11-16 years At this point, the adolescent is ability to think about their own
thinking the thoughts of others extremely important shift. This is what is meant by the term metacognition. This kind of self-
reflection allows for a wide-ranging stretch of the imagination. The opportunity for self-correction in problem solving is much greater.
Adolescent, however, are more likely to recognize that others` viewpoints are different from their own. It is though they
understand that others have different interests, knowledge, and ways of thinking than they have.
In this study, the fifth graders of elementary school ages range from 10-11 years old. Based on he Piaget’s work, they are between
concrete and formal operation. They leave concrete operation gradually and come to the formal operation. In conclusion, the fifth
graders need simple and concrete tasks.
c. Elementary school children
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