Английский язык учебник

acuity, near sighted, an eye, bland, odor, smells, speech sounds, visual system, salty, a tone, sweet tasting, bitter, noxious, sour, sound, liquid, a buzzer, music, focus, edges, source

B.Complete these sentences using one of the words from the box above in each space.

1.The human _____ consists of the eye, several parts of the brain and the pathways connecting them.

2.The _____ has an immense ability to accommodate itself to environmental conditions.

3.Visual _____ refers to the eye’s ability to resolve details.

4._____ originates from the motion, or vibration of an object.

5.Sensitivity to _____ substances is best near the front of the tongue, sensitivity to _____ substan ces is best on the soft palate.

6.Children try to avoid _____ substances.

7.Children reared in an environment in which people talk to them and reward them for making _____

talk earlier than children who do not receive such attention.

8.People who are _____ are unable to focus clearly on distant objects.

9.Each kind of receptor may respond to many differ ent _____.

10.Children’s ability to distinguish among _____ in creases their chances of survival.

Exercise 6. Find words in the text that mean:

SPEAKING AND DISCUSSION

Exercise 1. Answer the following questions to the text.

1.What idea was prevalent at the end of the 19th cen tury?

2.How do developmental psychologists study the ca pacities of young infants?

3.What objects attract infants’ attention?

4.How do infants respond to different sounds?

5.Are human infants born with perceptual mecha nisms of human speech?

6.How do infants discriminate between different tastes?

7.What smells do infants prefer?

8.Why does the ability to distinguish among smells have an adaptive value?

9.What studies does evidence for early learning and remembering come from?

10.What do infants’ preferences for mother’s voice stem from?

Exercise 2. Discuss the following statements with your group mates making use of the ex pressions below.

From my point of view…

As I see it …

As far as I can judge …

It must be admitted that…

There is no denying that…

I don’t quite agree with you …

1.Infants enter the world with all of their sensory systems functioning.

2.Infants at birth can hear all the phonetic distinc tions used in the world’s language.

3.Newborn infants are sensitive to many of the fea tures of objects that adults use to distinguish one thing from another.

4.With development, infants have been found to per ceive depth, objects and faces with increasing pre cision.

Exercise 3. Retell the text dwelling on the following points:

–the studies of the young infants’ capacities

–infants’ vision

–infants’ hearing

–infants’ smell and taste

–infants’ learning and memory

Exercise 4. Read the questions before the text, scan it, and try to give extended answers.

1.How may giftedness be defined?

2.What people are considered gifted?

3.What role does nurture play in giftedness?

4.Why have many standardized tests been criticized on a variety of grounds?

Intellectual giftedness is generally indicated by an IQ of least 125 or 130. People who are extremely crea tive are also considered gifted, although their gifted ness can be hard to identify by academic performance or standardized tests. Giftedness has been defined not only in terms of specific talents and academic abilities, but also by general intellectual characteristics (inclu ding curiosity, motivation, ability to see relationships, and long attention span) and personality traits such as leadership ability, independence and intuitiveness. In

general, gifted people are creative, innovative thinkers who are able to envision multiple approa ches to a problem and devise innovative and unusual solutions to it.

Nurture plays a significant role in giftedness. Re searchers comparing the behavior of parents of gifted children spend more time reading to them and encou raging creative types of play and are more involved with their schooling. They are also more likely to actively encourage language development and expose their chil dren to cultural resources outside the home, including those not restricted specifically to children, such as art and natural history museums. The involvement of fa thers in a child’s academic progress has been found to have a positive effect on both boys and girls in ele mentary school in terms of both grades and achieve ment test scores. Within the family, grandparents can also play a positive role as mentors, listeners and role models. Even within a single family, gifted ness can be influenced by such environmental fac tors as birth order, gender, differences in treatment by parents, and other unique aspects of a particular child’s experiences.

Standardized intelligence tests, most often the Stanford Binet or Wechsler tests, always play a role in assessing giftedness, even though such tests have been criticized on a variety of grounds, including an overly narrow definition of intelligence, possible racial and cultural bias, and the risk of unreliability due to varia tions in testing conditions. Critics have questioned the correlation of IQ scores with achievement later in life, pointing out that standardized tests don’t measure many of the personal qualities that contribute to pro fessional success, such as independence, motivation, persistence, and interpersonal skills. In addition, cre ativity and intuition that are hallmarks of giftedness may actually lower a person’s scores on tests that ask for a single solution to a problem rather than re

warding the ability to envision multiple solutions, a trait called divergent thinking by psychologists, that often characterizes giftedness.

Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd edition, Gale Group, 2001

Exercise 5. Speak about a friend (acquaintance) of yours who, in your opinion, is gifted or talented, what role nurture played in his development and who had an especially positive effect on his (her) academic progress. Describe his (her) intellectual characteristics such as curiosity, motiva tion, long attention span and so on and personality traits (leadership ability, in dependence, intuitiveness), his ability to devise innovative and unusual solutions to a problem.

And what do you think about yourself? Are you gifted?

Exercise 6. Scan the following text and do the tasks below.

PIAGET’S STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Although most parents are aware of the intellec tual changes that accompany their children’s physical growth, they would have difficulty describing the na ture of these changes. The ways in which contempo rary psychologists describe these changes have been most profoundly influenced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who is widely acknowledged to be one of the century’s most influential thinkers. Prior to Piaget, psychological thinking about chil dren’s cognitive development was dominated by the biological maturation perspective, which gave almost exclusive weight to the “nature” component of develop ment, and by the environmental learning perspective,

which gave almost exclusive weight to the “nurture” component. In contrast, Piaget focused on the interac tion between the child’s naturally maturing abilities and his or her interactions with the environment. He saw the child as an active participant in this process, rather than as a passive recipient of biological develop ment or external stimuli. He viewed children as “in quiring scientists” who experiment with objects and events in their environment to see what will happen. The results of these experiments are used to construct schemas – theories about how physical and social worlds operate. Upon encountering a novel object or event, the child attempts to assimilate it – that is, to understand it in terms of a preexisting schema. If the new experience does not fit the existing schema, the child – like any good scientist – modifies the schema and thereby extends his or her theory of the world. Piaget called this process accommodation.

In the course of the work Piaget began wondering why children made the kinds of error they made. What distinguished their reasoning from that of adults? He observed his own children closely as they played, pre senting them with simple scientific and moral prob lems and asking them to explain how they arrived at their answers. Piaget’s observations convinced him that children’s ability to think and reason progresses through a series of qualitatively distinct stages. He di vided cognitive development into four major stages, each of which has a number of substages. The major stages are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the stage of concrete operations, and the stage of formal operations.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget designated the first two years of life as the sensorimotor stage, a period in which infants are busy discovering the relationships between their actions and the consequences of those actions. They discover, for

example, how far they have to reach to grasp an object and what happens when they push their dish over the edge of the table. In this way they begin to develop a concept of themselves as separate from the external world.

An important discovery of this stage is the concept of object permanence, the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it is not present. If a cloth is placed over a toy that an 8 month old is reaching for, the infant immediately stops reaching and appears to lose interest in the toy. The baby seems neither sur prised nor upset, makes no attempt to search for the toy, and acts as if the toy had ceased to exist. In cont rast, 10 month old will actively search for an object that has been hidden under the cloth or behind a screen. The older baby seems to realize that the object exists even though it is out of sight: thus, the infant has attained the concept of object permanence. But even at this stage, search is limited.

The Preoperational Stage

By about 11/2 to 2 years of age, children have begun to use symbols. Words can represent things or groups of things, and one object can represent another. Thus, a 3 year old may treat a stick as if it were a horse and ride it around the room. But although 3 and 4 year olds can think in symbolic terms, their words and images are not yet organized in a logical manner. During this preoperational stage of cognitive develop ment the child does not yet comprehend certain rules or operations. An operation is a mental routine for separating, combining, and otherwise transforming information in a logical manner. For example, if water is poured from a tall, narrow glass into a short, wide one, adults know that the amount of water has not changed because they can reverse the transformation in their minds; they can imagine pouring the water from the short glass back into the tall glass, thereby

arriving back at the original state. In the preopera tional stage of cognitive development, a child’s under standing of reversibility and other mental operations is absent or weak. As a result, according to Piaget, preoperational children have not yet attained conser vation – the understanding that the amount of a sub stance remains the same even when its form is changed. Thus, they fail to understand that the amount of water is conserved – that is, remains the same – when it is poured from the tall glass into the short one.

Piaget believed that preoperational thinking is dominated by visual impressions. The reliance on vi sual impressions is illustrated by an experiment on the conservation of number. If two rows of checkers are matched one for one against each other, young chil dren will say, correctly, that the rows have the same number of checkers. If the checkers in one row are brought closer together to form a cluster, 5 year olds say that there are now more checkers in the straight row – even though no checkers have been removed. The visual impression of a long row of checkers overrides the numerical equality that was obvious when the checkers appeared in matching rows. In contrast, 7 year olds assume that if the number of objects was equal before, it must remain equal. At this age, nume rical equality has become more significant than visual impression.

Another key characteristic of preoperational chil dren, according to Piaget, is egocentrism. Preopera tional children are unaware of perspectives other than their own – they believe that everyone else perceives the environment the same way they do. To demonstrate this, Piaget created the “three mountain problem”. A child is allowed to walk around a table on which are ar ranged three mountains of different heights. Then the child stands on one side of the table while a doll is placed on the table at various locations (and therefore

has a different view of the three mountains than the child). The child is asked to choose a photograph that shows what the doll is seeing. Before the age of 6 or 7, most children choose the photograph that illustrates their own perspective on the three mountains.

Piaget believed that egocentrism explains the ri gidity of preoperational thought. Because young chil dren cannot appreciate points of view other than their own, they cannot revise their schemas to take into ac count changes in the environment. Hence, their inabi lity to reverse operations or conserve quantity.

Operational Stages

Between the ages of 7 and 12, children master the various conservation concepts and begin to perform other logical manipulations. They can place objects in order on the basis of a dimension such as height or weight. They can also form a mental representation of a series of actions. Five year olds can find their way to a friend’s house but cannot direct you there or trace the route with paper and pencil. They can find their way because they know that they have to turn at cer tain places, but they have no overall picture of the route. In contrast, 8 year olds can readily draw a map of the route. Piaget calls this period the concrete oper ational stage. Although children are using abstract terms, they are doing so only in relation to concrete ob jects – that is, objects to which they have direct senso ry access.

At about the age of 11 or 12, children arrive at adult modes of thinking. This is the formal operatio nal stage, in which the person is able to reason in purely symbolic terms. In one test for formal operational thinking, the child tries to discover what determines how long a pendulum will swing back and forth (its pe riod of oscillation). The child is presented with a length of string suspended from a hook, and several weights that can be attached to the lower end. He or

she can vary the length of the string, change the at tached weight, and alter the height from which the bob is released. In contrast to children who are still in the concrete operational stage – who will experiment by changing some of the variables, but not in a systematic way – adolescents of even average ability will set up a series of hypotheses and test them systematically. They reason that if a particular variable (weight) af fects the period of oscillation, the effect will appear only if they change one variable and hold all others constant. If this variable seems to have no effect on the length of time the pendulum will swing, they rule it out and try another. Considering all the possibilities – working out the consequences for each hypothesis and confirming or denying these consequences – is the es sence of formal operational thought.

Piaget’s theory is a major intellectual achieve ment; it has revolutionized the way we think about children’s cognitive development. However, new, more sophisticated methods of testing the intellectual func tioning of infants and preschool children reveal that Piaget underestimated their abilities.

Rita L. Atkinson, Richard C. Atkinson, Edward E. Smith, Daryl J. Bem, Susan Nolen Hoeksema, Carolyn D. Smith “Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology”, Thirteen Edition, USA, 2001, pp. 76–81

Task 1. Say whether these statements are true (T) or false (F), and if they are false, say why.