Revista de Letras - Utad

112 László Magocsa
needs a very careful organization of the activities from the educator to be really
successful while attempting to provide relevant activities in order to develop the
children’s language knowledge. According to my experience children like being
challenged and being involved in the activities which require emotional and
mental participation as well. If we organize the activities in the way that there is
involved a good deal of thinking and figuring out what to say and do in certain
situations we will probably achieve, that the children will eagerly participate in
the activities aimed to develop their language capability. Thinking in this respect
will be based on the Universal Grammar (Chomsky, N. (1968) of the child.
Under proper stimulation (usually the desire to communicate with the peers in
the second language [L2] ) the activity itself requires willingness to construct
his/her utterances in the target language i.e., to think about what to say.
Constructing the ideas to express in this way the utterances would comprise the
subvocal use of the language (English) which is the mediator for them in the
activities in question and will be based on the common Universal Grammar,
which is at the same time the base of thinking in the mother tongue.
In this case, when satisfying the children’s genuine need to think about the
situations being involved in by giving incentives to the utterances and activities
in English we consciously appeal to the Universal Grammar inhabited in their
mind. In this case the mind does not distinguish between the utterances made
using the mother tongue or the L2. Consequently, the new information about the
language and the other names or codes of the objects necessary to the activities
in question can be stored in that particular Universal Grammar inventory, where
the mother tongue storage is. All of these mean, that the knowledge acquired in
this way, will not perish easily, as the items learned in the mother tongue do not
do it either. The main point is that the acquisition is going on in a subconscious
way according to the above described process. It means, that the children are not
aware of being taught, on the contrary they are participating in an interesting and
exciting chat and activity with someone, (the educator and the peers) who have
provided the circumstances in which the interaction can have its logical and
natural place. The question is: how can we, teachers of the language facilitate
this unconscious acquisition? Is there a domain, which cannot be neglected?
Well, this particular domain does exist, and it is called personal differences, or to
put it another way individual psychological types of the learners. They are
different and we can say that there are no two children who could be ‘treated’ in
the same way while working on their second language acquisition (SLA). In the
kindergarten setting this situation has its own emphasized importance because
the children of this age are not able to control their cognitive and receptive
processes in the way as those of attending primary schools, e.g. We, the
educators are supposed to lead them in this way of acquisition properly while we