Main+Theories

__**Lev Vygotsky**__

The "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that a child can complete independently and those completed with the guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children. The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor. Vygotsky focused on the child-in-context acting in a situation or event as the smallest unit of study. Vygotsky defined “context” as a child’s culture and how they express their culture. Further, the child is continually acting in social interactions with other people. Vygotsky argued that looking at child development without cultural context distorts our view of development, and often causes us to look at causes of behaviour as residing within the child, rather than in their culture. In our syllabus we consider the ZPD of our students, we will set task which are into their ZPD because we want our pupils to be able to complete their tasks by themselves and we (teacher) will be their guide. On the other hand all the tasks of each unit are designed from the perspective of the child, what he knows and what interests him. It is very important this point because as Vygotsky said the child will not be able to complete the task or to develop new knowledge if they are out of children´s ZPD. Vygotsky defined his theory about language acquisition too. He divided the learning of a language in different steps which have several sort of speech: ● Public speech: exchange communicative between two or more people. ● Private speech: internal speech, when the people talk aloud to themselves. Vygotsky believed that children who engaged in large amounts of private speech are more socially competent than children who do not use it extensively. ● Inner speech: speak with yourself. Inner speech is not an internal aspect of talking; it is a function in itself ● Verbal thought: the way of thinking, due to your own culture. Firstly, the teacher select her public speech, because she is the leader, she chooses in detail the discourse (all what she is going to said) and the movements and paralanguage that she will use. When teacher use her public speech in her lessons she is trying that her pupils will develop their private speech starting from the speech that she uses. We have considered Vygotsky language acquisition theory because when we have planning activities of written and speaking we have selected the type of text that we are going to use in detail. We have also planned the way we will speak or move into the class because we want that our pupils have a reference to follow.

__**Howard Gardner**__

To know how pupils are during this first cycle is very important if we want to know how to deal with all the new situations that we are going to find. The main ideas of Gardner’s theories about the language acquisition process in order to develop thinking in our learners are one of our premises. Our aims, as future teachers, will be to make our pupils independents learners little by little, while we develop the independent, cooperative, collaborative and self- learners.

According to Gardner´s theory, we will work those intelligences in our class by corners as we will explain later.

 Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: we encourage this intelligence in the meeting area or physical space with dramatization or dances. This is the most important intelligence for us, especially in the first cycle. It is due to children learn through their bodies and express themselves through them too.


 *  Interpersonal intelligence: we develop this intelligence in all corners and in the pupil´s tables, when they work in groups.
 * Intrapersonal intelligence: pupils also work individually in order to work this kind of intelligence.
 * Musical intelligence: it will be worked with songs, dances and using the musical instruments.
 * Spatial intelligence: the geography of classroom is designed in order to pupils can create a mental image. Furthermore, we use visual aids as grids, charts, displays, mediators and pictures.
 * Linguistic intelligence: we foster this intelligence in all areas, because our pupils needs to communicate with others through the language, into the classroom pupils develop this intelligence especially in the library and thinking corner.
 * Logical-mathematical intelligence: this intelligence is most often worked in the numbers and science corner.
 * Naturalistic intelligence: it will be worked in the library corner with the plants, in the science corner with the animals and in the playground.

__**Jerome Bruner**__

Jerome Bruner was one of the most influential constructivists. He was influence by Piaget's ideas about cognitive development in children. Some of Bruner´s theoretical principles focus on these ideas: ● Nature of learning and learning process. ● Instructional scaffolding ● The intellectual development of the learner. Learning for Bruner is an active process, the learning process include according to Bruner: ● Selection and transformation or information. ● Decision-making. ● Generating hypotheses. ● Making meaning from information and experiences.

Instructional scaffolding: Based on Vygotsky's ideas about the Zone of Proximal Development, Jerome Bruner developed the importance concept of instructional scaffolding. This refers to the process through which able peers or adults offer supports for learning. This assistance becomes gradually less frequent as it becomes unnecessary, as when constructing a building a scaffold is removed. We believe that work in group is essential in this process and in primary education we use this way of work in a lot of activities, it will be reflected in our classroom spaces, where we have got a group work zone. According to Bruner, when the learner is faced with the new knowledge, a combination of concrete, pictorial and symbolic activities will lead to more effective learning, we know that there is so difficult to develop symbolic activities in the first cycle of primary.