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This is both too much, and not enough. It’s too much because some of this (e.g. reading and writing in a wide variety of genres) is unworkable at the beginning levels of immersion, and other activities (e.g. sister class networking with distant classes) aren’t always practical either. Only teachers (not theoreticians and professors) are in a position to decide this degree of detail.
It’s not enough because as we said the real, underlying problem is not really practical but theoretical. Fortunately, our graduate school is not just another training course for practical techniques; a graduate degree is designed to equip you to do your own theorizing, and that is exactly what we are going to do here.
As Jim Cummins points out, of the central theoretical things we’ve learned from immersion is that merely understanding input is not enough. In fact, as Merrill Swain points out, understanding input, speaking and writing is not enough either (1993).
Vygotsky says that the speech differences we see between basic interpersonal communication and academic language proficiency is really phenotypical: it is a “surface”, epiphenomenal, external distinction which both reflects and masks differences that are more genotypical: “deep”, genetic, internal differences in thinking.
For example, children and adults both use the word “day” to refer to time. But the child’s day is often little more than the daylight, the waking activity of the child, perhaps twelve or fourteen hours. The child’s day comes from the child’s experience of the daylight hours. The child does not think of where the day begins and ends, or how different cultures and different countries experience the same day differently. The adult’s day is (at least) a twenty-four hour day, and the adult may even think globally of time zones, the international date line, etc. (for example if the adult has to make a long distance phone call). The adult’s day is at least potentially an academic, scientific concept. Of course the adult can also use the child’s day as a functional equivalent of the concept. But the reverse is not true; the child cannot use the adult day as a way of measuring out his or her playtime. .
In the last chapter, we saw that Vygotsky and Sakharov’s work revealed a big difference between:
a) the “syncretic” thinking of very young children (the way young children subjectively make heaps or jumbles of objects just because they like to),
b) the “complexive” thinking of somewhat older children (the way in which children group objects because of objective, concrete, factual and visual resemblances), and
c) true conceptual thinking (the way in which adults recognize objects as concrete instances of idealized entities, a way of thinking that is simultaneously subjective and objective).
For most of the 1920s, Vygotsky and his colleagues in the Ministry of Education (the Narkompros, as it was called in the
In 1929, the pedologists, along with Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, came under attack by the new regime led by Stalin. The new leadership had collectivized agriculture, and was pushing for rapid industrialization, and they wanted a highly accelerated education system based on science concepts that would allow them to catch up with and even surpass the West. They believed that the old curriculum based on complexes was too easy.
A decree put an end to the “labor school” that had been set up by Vygotsky’s colleage Blonsky. Vygotsky, who was editor in chief of the main journal of the pedologists, began to be heavily criticized. Sakharov himself committed suicide. Heartbroken, Vygotsky took three steps back. First, he renounced the teaching of complexes. Then he explicitly criticized the pedologists (including, of course, himself): And finally he began to argue that teaching has to orient to the future of development and not to the child’s past. Here he began to formulate for the first time a link between microgenesis and ontogenesis, and not simply a limit to the kind of curriculum that children can learn..
As is well known, for a time there was the domination amongst us of a system of school teaching in complexes, and that pedagogical arguments were furnished in support of this system. It was said that this system of complexes corresponded to the characteristics of child thinking. The fundamental error lay in the fact that the way in which the problem was posed was wrong in principle. It derived from the idea that teaching had to base itself on development on the characteristics of development of child thinking. The pedologists prescribed their consolidation, through the system of complexes, the development of what the child should have abandoned at the entrance of school. This oriented to what the child could do thinking on his own, and ignored the possibility of a transition from what he knew to what he did not know how to do. It evaluated the state of development like a stupid gardener: only on the basis of mature fruit. It did not consider that teaching could push development forward. It did not consider the area of proximal development. (6.4)
But these steps allowed him to take three giant steps forward. His first step was to distinguish between learning and development.
Now he could imagine a form of learning which brought developing processes into fruition in a “zone of proximal development” (or, perhaps more correctly a “next zone of development”, because it was really part of a complete theory of child ontogenesis he was in the process of working out when he died).
His next step was to replace the bewildering array of complexes, pseudoconcepts, and potential concepts with the idea of a measure of generality.
We have succeeded in establishing that generality (differences in generality) does not coincide with the structure of generalization at the different stages that we determined in our experimental study on the formation of concepts: syncretism, complexes, preconcepts and concepts. (6.6)
He imagined the “measure of generality” as a kind of globe, where one pole was represented by object related meaning (e.g. ostension, indication, naming unique objects) and the other by pure abstraction. We can think of it like this: (things)
plants animals
(numbers)
ABSTRACTION-RELATED
Vygotsky’s third step was to differentiate academic, scientific and foreign language concepts on the one hand and the everyday concepts of the native language on the other, placing academic concepts well to the SOUTH of everyday concepts, and to study how these two very different types of concept interact. This allowed him to focus on the issue of conscious awareness and systematization of what the child knows, the volitional access that transforms a concept for others into a concept for myself..
As we said above, in order to become aware of something and to master it, we must first of all possess it. But the concept—or more exactly the preconcept, as we prefer to indicate concepts of which the schoolchild has not yet become aware and which have not yet reached the higher stage of their development—appear for the first time in school age and only mature during this period. Before that time, the child thinks using general representations, or complexes, as we have elsewhere called those initial structures of generalization which dominate during the preschool period. (6.2)
This time, however, his data were not based on the sorting of objects in a strange, experimental situation but rather based on actual classroom work. Here he drew on the work of another, more fortunate graduate student, Iosefina Schif, who after Vygotsky’s death went on to publish a book about their work and made a career as an expert in the field of disabled children and special education.
Vygotsky and Schif were interested in the implementation of the new social science curriculum which was designed to teach the children about history, sociology and above all politics. Concepts like ‘revolution’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘socialism’ were new to the children, and as Vygotsky pointed out they functioned something like the artificial concepts introduced in Sakharov’s experiment (“cev”, “mur”, “bik”, and “lag”).
In order to measure how well the children had grasped the new concepts, used an old testing method from Piaget’s work: The children were asked to complete sentence fragments ending in either ‘because’ or ‘although’, e.g.
a) Kolya went to the cinema because…
b) Olya is not a very good reader yet, although…
Vygotsky and Schif then compared these answers to sentences like:
c) The revolution of 1905 took place because…
d) Socialism is being built in the
Now, you might think that children would find a) and b), which are based on the child’s experience and his spontaneous concepts, MUCH easier to do than c) and d), which are based on what the child learned in class.
Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely!) that’s not what happened.
이 연구로 얻은 성과로 인해 우리는 과학적 개념의 발달이라는 특정한 문제와 학령기 아동의 생각 발달이라는 포괄적 문제에 관한 몇몇 결론을 도출할 수 있었다. 각각의 연령 집단을 고려한 비교 분석에 의한 결과처리를 통해 우리는 적합한 교육과정에서 과학적 개념의 발달이 자발적 개념의 발달을 따라잡고 앞서 나가고 있다는 것을 확인했습니다. 표는 이런 결론에 대한 실험적 근거를 제공하고 있습니다.
과제 : 연결사를 포함한 문장 |
완성된 문장 비율 ( % ) | ||
2학년 |
4학년 | ||
인과( ○○ 때문에 ) |
과학적 개념들 |
79.70 |
81.80 |
일상적 개념들 |
59.00 |
81.30 | |
반의(비록 ○○ 이지만) |
과학적 개념들 |
21.30 |
79.50 |
일상적 개념들 |
16.20 |
65.50 |
“An investigation of all the accumulated materials has permitted us to come to a series of conclusions on the level of the general rules of development (of thinking) at school age and the particular problem of the way in which scientific concepts develop. The comparative analysis of this has shown that in the presence of adequate programmes in a process of instruction, the development of scientific concepts is superior to that of spontaneous concepts. The table which we give below confirms this.
Comparative table of the resolution of problems with everyday concepts and scientific concepts (in percent)
TASKS 2nd Grade 4th Grade
Finishing phrases containing the conjunction
BECAUSE
Scientific concepts 79.7 81.8
Everyday concepts 59.0 81.3
Finishing phrases containing the conjunction
ALTHOUGH
Scientific concepts 21.3 79.5
Everyday concepts 16.5 65.5
Today it is easy to look at this and laugh. The children simply memorized sentences they had been taught in the new social science curriculum and used them to complete the tests. Of course, something like that must have happened. Yet that cannot be the whole story.
First of all, it doesn’t explain the gap between the development of the concept ‘because’ and the development of the ‘although’ concept. Secondly, it cannot explain why the everyday concepts appear to catch up with the science concepts in fourth grade. And finally, when we look (as we did with Towsey and Macdonald) at the interview data and not simply at test results, we find that many of the science concepts are not so different from the everyday concepts.
For example, when a child is asked to define serfdom, the child can say something like “We call serfs all the peasants who were the property of the landlords.” This is very different from the child’s understanding of the word ‘brother’, because the child cannot really give a good definition of a brother and will even say that although the child has a brother his brother doesn’t have one. But then the child is asked, “And how did the landlords live during the period of feudal servitude?” and the child replies, “Very well. Everything was sumptuous at their place. They had a house of ten stories with lots of rooms, all well dressed. They had electricity.” Of course, this is completely wrong: serfdom was abolished long before skyscrapers were built or even electricity was made publically available in
Vygotsky remarks:
We see in this example the original comprehension, somewhat simplified, that the child has of the essence of the regime of feudal serfdom. It is more of an imaginary representation than a scientific concept in the proper sense of the term. Of a completely different nature is the case of a concept like “brother”. Here the incapacity for analysis above the situational significance of the word, the incapacity to treat it as a concept of “brother”, that is to say as an abstract concept, the impossibility of evading logical contradictions in operations with this concept, these are the most frequent and the most real perils for the development of everyday concepts.
He concludes that although on analysis the psychological nature of the child’s everyday concepts and science concepts are not that different, their weaknesses and strengths are complementary because of the very different way in which they develop.
We may say that the strength of the scientific concept is shown in the sphere which is entirely defined by the higher properties of concepts; the seizure of conscious awareness and volition; it is in precisely this sphere that the everyday concepts show their weakness, while they are strong in the areas of concrete, spontaneous application in a sense given by the situation, in the sphere of experience and empirical fact. The development of scientific concepts begins in the sphere of the seizure of conscious awareness and volition and proceeds forwards, growing downwards towards the sphere of personal and concrete experience. The development of spontaneous concepts begins in the sphere of the concrete and the empirical and moves towards the higher properties of concepts: the seizure of conscious awareness and volition. The links which unite these developments of two opposed lines of development are fully manifest: this is the link which units the proximal area of development with the current level of development.
The strength of the everyday concept, like the strength of the words of the native language, lies in vividness, in concreteness, and in the fact that it is saturated with the child’s own experience. In contrast, the strength of the science concept lies in its systematicity, its accessibility out of context, and its readiness for volitional and conscious use. The weakness of the everyday concept consists of its lack of consistency, its context-dependency, and its lack of conscious awareness, while the weakness of the science concept lies in its empty verbalism, its “listen and repeat” character, and its insufficient saturation with concrete experience.
Vygotsky says that what is true of the science concept is also true of the foreign language learned in the classroom, which functions very much like a science concept, because it develops from voluntary control to everyday experience. And here we come to the theoretical reasons that explain why and how the immersion teacher needs to use Korean in the English immersion classroom: Korean is the child’s source of graphic imagery and vivid expression, Korean allows the child the ability to flesh out foreign language concepts with his or her own concrete examples, and of course Korean is saturated with the child’s own experiences.
On the other hand, using Korean ONLY makes it hard for the child to reflect on language itself. For example, on the level of pronunciation, it’s very hard for children to consciously control the production of Korean sounds, but this is easy in English (perhaps it is for this reason that we sometimes hear kids playfully pronouncing Korean words in an English way). It is hard for the child to see, for example, that the Korean way of using the singular noun to refer to a concept is the functional equivalent of the English way of using the plural noun. It is hard for kids to see Korean postpositions (like ‘에” or “에서”) as the functional equivalents of English prepositions (“in” and “from”). Without any comparison, the fish cannot know what water is.
So Korean has two roles in the immersion classroom. First, it provides a rich source of STUDENT input for the teacher to reformulate into English and use, and this may go some way to helping with the first problem that Cummins points out, the persistent lag between the comprehension ability of immersion students and their productive ability. Secondly, it provides the children with a standpoint OUTSIDE of their native language, a lever with which to move the earth, and a position from which to compare and see that, like the part-whole relations that we found at the basis of mathematical equations, both languages are parts of a larger whole.
c) Checking Integration: Should we teach Korean in English or English in Korean?
To conclude this chapter, let’s go back to Ms. Shin Yura’s class and look at how the children memorize the names of the continents. Which will work better? The children’s strategy of creating Korean mnemonics, or the FT’s strategy of “Listen and Repeat” and singing songs?
KT: Let's play a memorizing game in groups. This will be like ‘가족오락관’, so each of the members in your group have to say the names of the continents in order. If you can remember all the 7 continents, you win. And the winners will get this...꿈틀이!(showing the students a bag of gummy worms.)
Ss: Wow! 꿈틀이! I want..
(Trying to memorize the 7 continents together in groups)
FT: Okay, group1! Dong-wu start!
Group1: Asia-Africa-Europe.........-South
Group2: North America-Asia-Europe-South America-Africa
KT: And..? What else? You said 4. Try to use the song! The song goes like, 'Don't forget..?'
S10:
KT: Don't forget,
Ss:
KT: Okay. So group 3 goes next.
Group 3: Asia-South America-North America-Africa-Europe-Oceania
(Group 3 also failed to remember the 7 continents, still missing
KT: Oh! What a shame! There's one missing. Group 4!
We can see that the song mnemonic doesn’t appear to work very well. Why should this be?
Try singing the alphabet song (ABCDEFG…). Now try singing it BACKWARDS (ZYXWVUT…). Why is it so EASY to sing the alphabet song one way, and not the other? It appears that when we sing the alphabet song we are remembering the alphabet as if it were a single unanalyzed word, in which the letters and sounds come in an absolutely invariant order.
In Ms. Shin’s class, the children appear to remember “
Group 4 has a good idea. Instead of going from the FAMILIAR to the UNFAMILIAR, they turn it around. They start with the UNFAMILIAR information FIRST. Then the list gets easier instead of more difficult.
Group 4: Antarctica-Oceania-Africa-Asia-Europe-South America-North
Ms. Shin comments: “Group 4 started by mentioning
As with many classes, the first group which volunteers (or is nominated) tends to be rather more proficient in English, and the other groups, sitting in the back of the class are less proficient. This is not always a bad thing; sometimes the first groups “break the ice” or “break the trail” for the later groups; by paying attention to the performances of the other groups the less proficient English are able to build on their performances and may even be able to outperform them.
However, this practice effect only works if the groups pay attention to each other! The later groups have to listen to the earlier ones, learning from their mistakes and profiting from their mnemonic devices. Let’s find out if Group Six (which according to Ms. Shin is like Group 5 a much less proficient group than Group 1 or 4) can avoid the mistakes of Group 5 and pick up on the successful mnemonics of Group 1 for “
Group 6: Antarctica-South America-Asia-Oceania-North America-Africa-Europe
They did it! Bravo, Group 6! Ms Shin remarks: “Regardless of the teachers' intention, students happened to use the strategy of remembering names by building some kind of bridge between the English sound and Korean meaning such as ‘쌌다메리카’(South America), ‘옷이 아니야’(Oceania). Even though they sound ridiculous, it seem to be actually working as we can see that group 6 students succeeded in the game using these. It reminded me of when I was in high school, my English teacher used to take advantage of mnemonics using similar sound between English and Korean. (For example, he told us to remember the word 'anniversary' using ‘아니, 벌써!’ which implicitly means it's already the yearly event again. At first it sounded silly, but I would never forget the word.) So I think, uptaking the other's mnemonics, students are learning a memorizing skill.”
She also notices: “The teachers taught the students a song and the fact that it's helpful to memorize the seven continents, so the students learned the song. But the students didn't really seem to use the song while they're playing the game. They rather seemed to count seven continents and try to figure out what's missing. In this case, students are not really learning the strategy that the teachers suggest. In conclusion, I would say that teaching isn't directly connected to learning. Learning can occur by imitating the peer group's utterances, even if has nothing to do with the teaching aim. Also teaching can fail to be linked with learning as my students didn't seem to use the strategy of using the song to memorize the continents. Here we can notice that teaching-learning relationship is never like selling-buying or lending-borrowing.”
Ms. Shin is right! The teaching-learning relationship is not like selling and buying or lending and borrowing. It is not even like listening and speaking, although of course listening and speaking are quite different from each other (speaking is not simply listening in reverse) and of course listening and speaking are heavily involved in teaching/learning.
First of all, it’s not just a two sided conversation: the children listen to each other and help each other as much or perhaps even more than the teacher. Secondly, as we saw in the last chapter, the children do not simply “buy” the concepts of the L1 curriculum, and so the teacher cannot simply “sell” them. They don’t even just “listen” to the teacher saying them; there is a complex process of concept formation involving imitation, but also involving reverse engineering and a considerable amount of original thinking.
d) Let’s Look Back: Some answers
Here are the questions we asked at the outset. Remember?
a) Getting Attention: Do children think in Korean when they listen to English speech?
b) Giving Information: Is there a qualitative difference between academic English concepts and Korean ones? Does the one turn into the other? How?
c) Checking Integration: Should we teach Korean in English or English in Korean?
We discovered that children CAN think in Korean when they listen to English speech, and sometimes this can be very useful (e.g. when introducing new vocabulary). But translation takes a lot of time, and the mind is an economical tool; we saw that children soon learn to see BOTH English AND Korean as parts of a whole—the whole child, and the whole child’s capacity for making meaning.
We discovered that English and Korean have complementary strengths and weaknesses, like science concepts and everyday concepts. English offers a systematicity, a conscious awareness, a point of comparison that the children cannot get through Korean alone. Korean, on the other hand, may offer solutions to the two outstanding problems that Cummins discovered in immersion programmes in
Finally, we discovered that children prefer their own inventions. By rendering English sounds in Korean and by putting the hard words first, the children were better able to memorize Ms. Shin’s list of concepts than by simply using the song and “Listen and Repeat” as the FT recommended.
e) Let’s Look Forward: Some new questions
Throughout this chapter, we’ve worked with Vygotsky’s distinction between native language concepts and foreign language concepts, which he saw as parallel to the distinction between science concepts and everyday concepts. He also saw it as the most important line of development in the school age years.
But it’s not enough to make these two groups of concepts distinct. The main thing we need to do is to show how they can be linked, how one kind can grow into the other. That is the task of the next chapter, which is about additive bilingualism.
References:
Cummins, J. (1979). Cognitive/academic language proficiency, linguistic interdependence, the optimum age question and some other matters. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 19, 121-129.
Cummins, J. (1998). Immersion education for the millennium: What have we learned from 30 years of research on second language immersion? In M.R. childs & R.M. Bostwick (Eds.), Learning through two languages: Research and Practice. Second Katoh Gakuen Internatoinal Symposium on Immersion and Bilingual Education. (pp. 34-47). Katoh Gakuen.
Swain, M. (1993). The output hypothesis: Just speaking and writing aren’t enough. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des language vivantes. 50 (1): 158-164.