O desenvolvimento da linguagem e pensamento da criança na visão de Piaget e Vygotsky

Abstract

The steps of development of the childhood arouse interest in the human being. Seeing the behavior of children is a natural thing for humans, also as making comparisons between them and another children. During a long period the development of speech was seen as smartness, as it differentiates a racional from an irracional being. The language can express and organize thoughts. These informations guided me to the following question: in face of the main scholars about the development of thinking in children, how does the building of thoughts and childhood language occur? Also, how the teachers can use this development in the process of learning? As the main target we tried to analyze the ideas of Vygotsky and Piaget related to that question. The research has bibliographic feature, starting with the analysis of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s works, that talk about the pedagogical approach of the development of language and the individual thoughts. To Piaget, what makes the mental development of the human being possible is the biological structure, so, to make the thoughts is necessary a genetic basement, a maturation of the organism, social experiences and the balance between the organism and the enviroment. To Vygotsky, the development of a child has a real level and a potencial level: in real level, it does the task without needing any help; the potential level is the capacity of the child to develop certain activity with the support of another person. Between these two levels there is a gap. This observation made Vygotsky create the theory of the Personal Development Zone (PDZ), where analyses the children’s capacity of real development to reach their potential. The interest of knowing the human being was a common area between these two scholars. They tried to explain the way that occur the development and the learning. Vygotsky has a completely different idea from Piaget about the assimilation of reality. However, they agree that maturation is a kids’ necessity. Piaget argues that the development of the children has a genetic factor as a basement, while Vygotsky says that the children have their development based in their social enviroment.