13 younger minds are more open to learning or simply because learners have longer to
acquire the language. As a fact, young children do not come to the language classroom empty-handed. They bring with them an already well-established set of
instincts, skills and characteristics which will help them to learn another language Halliwell, 1992:3
Gagne and Briggs 1975: 35 identify the children aged 4-6 years old are already very good at interpreting meaning necessarily understanding the individual
words, already have great skill in using limited language creatively, frequently learn indirectly rather than directly, able to take great pleasure in finding and creating fun
in what they do, and have already imagination.
b. Cognitive Development
Children do not think the same way as adults. According to Piaget as stated in Brown 1994: 60, there are four stages of development of cognitive
processes. One of these processes is equilibration. Equilibration means the overall process of reaching a state of balance between assimilation responding in terms
of previous learning and accommodation changing behavior in responding to the environment. In this stage, the process of acquiring knowledge happens. When a
child experiences a new event, disequilibrium sets in until he is able to assimilate and accommodate the new information and thus attain equilibrium.
Cognitive development takes many forms such as progress in recognizing what is familiar, learning from experiences, growing ability to deal with
14 information outside the world and progress in information processing Levin,
1983: 157. In order to acquire those forms, a child should go through the stage of development.
Piaget, as stated by Smith 1979:92, divides four major stages of cognitive development, they are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational, and formal operational. The first of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development is the sensorimotor
period, which extends from birth until about the age of two. In this stage, infants understand the world through the overt actions performed on it. They recognize
the surrounding through appearance, sound, and touch of object to one another. They also begin to make use of imitation, memory, and thought in a very simple
way. The second stage is preoperational period. Children who are in the stage of
preoperational are usually between the ages of two until seven. The preoperational child’s thought is characterized by newly emerging ability. It
means that they can now use representations rather than overt actions to solve problems. They learn to represent ideas and thoughts in a variety of ways such as
deferred imitation, symbolic play, drawing, mental images, and through spoken language. Deferred imitation is the imitation of objects and events that have not
been present for some times. Since the children usually try to copy a prior behavior, imitation is primarily.
15 Their thought is also characterized by the dominance of perception over
reasoning and by egocentrism, centration, and inability to follow transformations, and inability to solve conservation problems. In fact, they are able to think more
logically than children in the sensorimotor stage but they are still in semi logical way of thinking.
The third stage is concrete operational which usually occurs between the ages of seven until eleven. During these years, the child develops the ability to
apply logical thought to concrete problem at present. It means that during this stage, the child evolves logical thought processes that can be applied to the
existed problem. Concrete operational children cannot apply logical thought yet to problems that are hypothetical, purely verbal, or abstract. If they are presented
with a purely verbal problem, they are unable to solve it correctly. Then the last stage of cognitive developments is formal operations.
Children who have reached the developmental stage of formal operational are generally around the age of eleven until sixteen years old. Their cognitive
structures reach maturity during this stage. They have constructed the reasoning and logic to solve all classes of problems. It can be said that they are able to solve
abstract problems in a systematic and logical way.
c. How Children Learn
