Primary Students Learning English Difficult Cognitive Processing Mechanisms And Intervention Studies

Even though a large amount of research on children who have English learning difficulties has been done by people in western countries, there is little cognition research on children with English learning difficulties whose mother tongue is Chinese. This paper took the PASS model, based on comprehensive cognition processing intelligence theory, as a framework for looking at the cognition processing of children with second language English learning difficulties and formulated an effective diagnosis and intervention plan, in order to help such children to raise their corresponding cognition processing level. We discussed cognition processing in elementary school children during English language acquisition in China, including language classification and language specificity, to investigate the intrinsic processing mechanism of children with English learning difficulties, and took this as a foundation for designing intervention material, and investigated the effectiveness of cognitive intervention.Study I took the CAS cognition appraisal system as test material, and through comparison with Chinese language acquisition, attempted to comprehensively investigate cognition processing characteristics as well as cognition processing flaws in elementary school children learning English. The results showed that the PASS cognition process is highly related to the level of English language acquisition and academic achievement of elementary students. Regression analysis showed that English and Chinese language study had universality among elementary students in the aspect of processing while it showed differences brought about by the varied characteristics of different language families. Attention, simultaneous processing and successive processing had impact on both English and Chinese language acquisition. For example, Chinese language acquisition was more dependent on simultaneous processing, while English language acquisition was more closely related to successive processing. One processing characteristic of children with English learning difficulties was poor performance in the areas of planning and attention. They required more successive processing than simultaneous processing during the coding aspect of language acquisition.Study II took simultaneous processing as an example, to design experimental tasks in order to investigate language specificity in cognitive processing. The repeated measure analysis of the experimentation showed that neither the influences of task type nor gender are significant. It proved that simultaneous processing is a basic and universal cognitive capacity. In the two languages class tasks, however, the two groups were significantly different, showing that children's scores were influenced by which language they were studying. The content of the language itself, such as the sound, shape, and semantics of the linguistic stratification had different influences on the two groups of children.Study III, based on Studies I and II, reveals the corresponding weakness in cognitive capacity of children with English learning difficulties, providing the explicit direction for intervention research, thus suggesting the corresponding intervention plan. This consists of part of the mandate from PREP for students with learning difficulties in the English coding system (simultaneous processing - successive processing) while improving their level of attention and planning. The research proved the effectiveness of cognitive intervention.This study concluded, firstly, that the English language, for second language learners, had universality and specificity in cognitive processing. The primary difficulties of learning English as a second language for China's students lied in the program processing features of low levels of planning and attention paying, and the dominance of successive processing over simultaneous processing.Secondly, language had specificity in simultaneous processing, its sound, shape and meaning affected children's performance on cognition tasks.Thirdly, that cognitive intervention on students with learning difficulties in English helped improving English performance. Furthermore, long-term intervention achieved a significant level of improvement.