“Language Lies At The Root Of That Of Transformation Of The Environment That We Call Civilisation”. How Is Language Encouraged In Montessori Prepared Environment?
Language is the ability to understand speech and a desire to convey one's feelings and thoughts. It is a kind of barrier which encloses a given human company, and separates it from all others. It unites men and they develop and expand according to the need of their mind. It is through communication that human beings have cooperated with each other to solve common problems. It is through communication based on written and oral language in particular that each generation has passed on its accumulated wisdom to the next. “Language, we may say, grow with human thought.”(Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p109).
The learning of language is truly the child's most remarkable intellectual achievement, and is amazingly accomplished rapidly in a very short time span. "By merely living and without any conscious effort the individual absorbs from the environment even a complex cultural like language." (Elizabeth G. Hainstock, The Essential Montessori, pg. 81). Based on Montessori’s observation, the various periods of the child’s life show the same stages in the level reached and this applied to all the children throughout the world. With the existence of rules of language, a child can easily speak the language without difficulty. She stressed that the child learn a language begins in the deepest shadows of his unconscious mind, there it developed. The sensitive period for language occurs from birth to six years old. This sensibility is transitory and once gone it will never return. The language explosive happenings and eruptions in his powers of expression continue in the child well after the age of two. After two and a half years old, which marks the borderline of man’s mental formation, begins a new period in organising the language and this continues to develop without explosion, learn many new words and perfects his sentence formation. At six years old, a child has learnt to speak correctly according to the rules of his mother tongue. And all these work is done by...
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