Issue 4.3: Thinking and Language

The thinking and the language process are two important process that kids start to develop during the development period of the childhood, everybody agree that both periods are related and that the development of one can cause, or favor the development of the other one, but, which one goes first? From Piaget’s point of view the egocentric talk is the first one developed in child’s mind, is not directed to anyone so it’s more related to the thinking process rather than the talking one.  Paget also says that once the language is used as a communicative tool it is only the exteriorization of the existing schemes, but the action of talking is not important in the cognitive development and it doesn’t help the children to construct new structures. 

Vygotsky, on the other hand, thinks that the talk is first developed as a socialization tool, so it is first used on the outside world and, later on, transformed into an internal speech, so basically, he thinks the opposite of what Piaget did, that the talking activity is first developed and that the thinking one only appears when the out loud talking action is moved to an internal function. Moreover, Vygotsky says that the language development is the one that allows the development of the functions such as the self-regulation, and that the process through which the child interiorize that talking, also interiorize the self-regulation action.

Nowadays, the most accepted idea is that the thinking and the language are developed in a dialectical interrelation, which means that one of them (speech structures) become basic structures of the other (thought structures) but basically they help each other to foster and increase its quality.

On the school context we can find plenty of activities that have to be done combining both thinking and language processes, such as analyzing, reasoning, thinking critically, solving problems, expressing thoughts and feelings all these actions need, mandatorily, a correct combination of both processes, the thinking to understand, organize information, reasoning, take conclusions and prepare information in order to be able to transfer it, through the language, in a way that can be understood correctly.

 

     

Finally, the explanation of the picture we can see above shows graphically what happens one a student of a class has the cognitive approach more developed than his classmates. From Piaget's point of view we would say that this kid has achievd the formal operational stage while his classmates still on the concrete operational one, that's why he is able to undersand an abstract process such as the evaporization of the water and the other kids cannot. From Vygotzky's point of view we would say that this kid has achieved more interactios with other environments, for example maybe one day he was cooking pasta with his father and seeing that the casserola had steam around he decided to ask what was happening and by this interaction, now he can explain the evaporization process and his classmates cannot.

Anyway our job as future teacher is to take benefit of this situations, we don't have to punish or to treat differently that kid just because he had achieved more knowledge that his classmates or because he is in a different cognitive stage, because all the students will madurate, sooner or later, and from Vygotsky's thoery we could even use this child knowledge to develop his classmates' ZPD by peer interaction.

Every difficulty can be transformed into a useful tool if we work the harder it needs.