CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Children learn concepts best when they are given a wide range of experiences with the object and situations that their developing vocabulary expresses.

In this early processing of the world around them children aged 3- 6 year, who are still at the pre-primary school level, may begin to classify objects and instances, and these classification tasks are essential to concept formation. Munn in Mangal (2011) defined concept as a process which represents the similarities in otherwise diverse objects, situation, or events.

Similarly, Ross (2005) said that concepts are patterns, schemas or mental categories which enable people to interpret the objects of their thoughts; whether perceptual or imaginative. One can conclude that concept is a generalized idea about things, persons, or events. It stands for a general class and not for a particular objects or event. It is a common name given on the basis of similarities or commonness found in different objects, persons or events. It is also a mental disposition that helps in understanding the meaning of the objects of people’s thinking (Ugoji, 2000).

After looking at some of the characteristics of concepts above, one may easily conclude that a large portion of the words used and othersymbolic expressions in human language represent concepts. The names: horse, tree, dog, table, chair, represent concept of things; father, mother, teacher represent concept of persons; honesty, truthfulness, cleanliness, redness, goodness represent concepts of qualities and characteristics and so on.

Judging the importance of concepts in human lives, one must try to pay due attention to their proper development from a very early age of live.In every sphere of human life, people are very much helped by the identification, classification, categorization and naming of the objects, ideas or events provided by their acquired concepts. Human environment is full of tremendously diverse things. It consists of an infinite number of living andnon-living objects. Similarly, there are limitless ideas, thoughts, principles, formulae, theories and so on related to various aspects of human life and the environment. In such an environment of tremendous diversity one can adjust only if one has adequate power and ability to discriminate, classify, andcategorize the things around one (in view of their similarities and dissimilarities) in specific groups (Wilson, 1997). Concept learning helps one a lot in this gigantic task of categorizing and classifying the environmental objects. Moreover, the concepts regarding people, objects, places, ideas or events provide human symbolic and verbal behaviour.

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