Case study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 9

Case study - Essay Example She was quite vocal and articulate, greeting the other children with a Hello everyone! Child Z is from an Asian background but she approached other English children to ask, â€Å"you play with zu zu pets? This shows that Child Z is able to initiate interaction and blend well with her peers at the nursery school, even those from different ethnic backgrounds. This illustrates Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development which stipulates that children tend to learn through their interactions with their surrounding culture. Z appears to be a self confident young person, who has learnt to interact confidently with those in her environment (Seigler, 2006), perhaps because of the high levels of love and attention she has received in her home environment. In the class, when the teacher demonstrated to the children how to make a paper boat, Z chimed in enthusiastically, â€Å"I do it! I make boat in the water†. She appears to have a strong sense of self esteem and is confident enough about being able to complete the task of making a boat (Hartup, 1992). This demonstrates the element of self regulation which Schaeffer mentions, where children tend to instruct themselves through their speech patterns (Schaeffer, 2003: 271). Piaget offered the view that early speech tends to be egocentric and is directed at the self, despite being spoken aloud, hence it has no particular function in terms of thinking (Schaeffer, 2003: 270), but Vygotsky saw such speech as externalized thought which children use actively for problem solving. The child Z appears to be well advanced cognitively, and her speech appears to be externalized thought in problem solving rather than being directed at the self. Linguistically, Child Z shows a very high level of linguistic development. She is vocal and articulate in her responses; when the lunchroom assistant asked Z what she had in her lunch box,