From Pointing to Naming to Abstracting and Generalizing

[kellogg]

Good, Kitty. I think it's very useful to have notes on each section up here in Korean. I know that this site is used by a lot of people who are studying the book, and I also know that my own remarks (including these remarks right here) are probably not as useful to people as good notes in Korean by a Korean.

Of course, you can also find some pretty good summarizing notes at the END of each section (e.g. p. 256, p. 266). They are actually the notes I took rereading the text in French and in Italian after we finished translating it into Korean, and you will find that they are not that different from the notes you took.

Why are they similar? Because you and I read the same text, of course. Now, the same thing happens when children talk to adults. Because they are referring to the same objects and then later to the same ideas, they find themselves talking in ways that are not very different.

Not very different, but not EXACTLY the same. Unlike you and me, the child eventually discovers that the meanings that he or she is thinking of are slightly different from those of the adult in fairly consistent ways. Our classroom data offers plenty of interesting examples.

The teacher wants to establish a setting (“Where are they? Is it morning or afternoon?”), a set of characters (“Who is this? Who are Jinho's friends?”), a motive for interaction (“What is Ann feeling? What is Joon doing? What is Jinho thinking? What are they saying?”). But the children (and the FT) would rather talk about going to Caribbean Bay or to Ocean World (or maybe to Yangpyeong or Japan).

It's easy to just say that the children a

re lazy and the teacher is hardworking, and of course there is some truth in that. But there is a LOGICAL structure to what the teacher says that is lacking in which the kids and the FT want to do; there is the structure of COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION (a concept) rather than the relatively random structure of momentary desires (heaps)everyday experience (complexes).

We know this because we see the same contrast (the same struggle, the same conflict of thinking) in other data. The teacher wants to talk about land masses on the map, and the children simply talk about large countries that they have heard of. The teacher wants to compare family structure in the Joseon Dynasty with family structure today, and the children talk about “one parent” families. In each case, the child’s way of thinking is not really EGOCENTRIC (as Piaget claimed) but it is certainly CONCRETE and based on the child’s perceptual experience. We may say that with respect to the mental functions that the teacher wants to them to exercise, it is rather conservative, it is lacking in GENERALIZATION and in ABSTRACTION.

Vygotsky wants to study the reasons for this. Now, he doesn’t have the kind of classroom data that we have today (because MP3 recorders were not yet invented). So he does what a lot of graduate students do; he sets up a laboratory situation OUTSIDE class where he can study what children do.

It’s similar to what grad students do in another way too. The research design is not really his own, but taken over from “more advanced” research in other countries, in particular Germany.

5-2

아흐의 실험에서는 피실험자에게 문제 해결에 필요한 낱말들을 제공하고 먼저 외우도록 한다.(수단의 제시, 일종의 테스트) --> 기능적 방법

Right. Ach’s method is a functional method. But I think it is ALSO a method of double stimulation.

You see, “functional” means that the test presents a REASON for the concepts (the concepts are to be used to arrange the blocks in various ways).  In the Sakharov-Vygotsky test, the child has to guess what word is written on the bottom of the blocks in order to put all the blocks into four different corners of the board correctly. In the Ach test, the child has to REMEMBER what word WAS written on a removable label in order to arrange the blocks in the front row correctly.

Now, what does “double stimulation” mean? It simply means that there are TWO forms of stimulation rather than one. On the one hand, there are the blocks with all their colors, shapes, and sizes. As we shall see this is very stimulating, and even rather distracting for young children. And on the other there are the WORDS on the bottoms of the blocks and on removeable labels.

To tell you the truth, I don’t like the name “functional method of double stimulation” for TWO reasons. First of all, as we can see, the Ach method is ALSO a functional method of double stimulation, so the name doesn’t really tell us what is NEW about the Sakharov-Vygotsky method. Secondly, I don’t think a word is just a source of “stimulation”; I think understanding the role of the word that way is BEHAVIORISTIC.

비고츠키의 실험에서는 낱말의 뜻을 제공하지 않고, 매번 피실험자가 문제를 해결하려 시도한 후에 피험자가 새로 옮긴 블록을 뒤집어 확인시켜 준다.(과업의 제시, 문제 해결 과정에 초점)  --> 기능적 이중 자극법

Good. Kitty is right: in Vygotsky’s test, we get a much LONGER process of learning, because the child has to look at “hints” one by one and generalize from them.

This actually means that Vygotsky’s test does not have much RELIABILITY. The “hint” block that is offered by the researcher really depends VERY much on what the child does. If the child misplaces a “lag” into a “bik” pile, the researcher can show the child a correctly placed “mur” for comparison and see if the child is able to generalize from the correctly placed “lag” to the incorrectly placed one. But another child will misplace a “cev” or a “mur” and not a “lag”, and this may make a big difference. We cannot really call the difference intelligence. So Vygotsky’s test does not have much RELIABILITY or VALIDITY.

What good it is? Well, I think the PRODUCT of the test is really not much good at all. It doesn’t tell us anything about how intelligent the child is except in a very very crude ontogenetic sense: some of the kids can do the task and others cannot. But the PROCESS of the test, as we saw in Paula’s video, tells us a GREAT DEAL about how concrete the child’s thinking is and how the child gradually GENERALIZES from concrete representations (complexes) to more general and eventually more abstract ones (potential concepts).

5-3

아동과 청소년기 이후의 개념은 본질적으로 다르다.

개념의 형성에는 연상, 주의력, 판단, 결정적 성향등의 기초적 요인들이 필요하다.

또한 사회 또는 성인이 제공하는 문화적 직업적 사회적 과업들도 반드시 필요하다.

그러나 이것만으로는 충분하지 않다.

개인이 말이나 기회의 기능적 사용을 통해 스스로의 정신 과정을 숙달하는 것이 필요하다.

개념이 형성되도록 하는 핵심 수단은 "낱말"이며, 아동기의 낱말과 청소년기의 낱말은 상징적 기능과 의미론 적 구조상 매우 다르다.

Right. This WHOLE chapter is essentially written to try to convince Vygotsky’s graduate students (he is writing material for Russian teachers who are studying for a MA degree by correspondence) that concept formation is not really ready in the child until school age, even though all of the mental FUNCTIONS (perception, attention, memory, selection, and even generalization and abstraction) are completely developed.

Why not? Well, for exactly the same reason we started with. The child is using words, and the use of words “agrees” by and large with the use of adults. But the adult is using them in a consistently different way which the child cannot see or hear. The child must learn to think.

Remember that Helen said that her “first” word was “water”. But we learned that this was not true. In fact, long before she learned “water”, she was gesturing, pushing,  pulling, inviting, pointing, holding, dropping, breaking, and using gestures or even sounds that were functionally equivalent to “This” or “That” or “here” or “there”.

When the child uses words like “this” or “that” or “here” or “there” or “now” the child may be thinking in ways that are almost indistinguishable from feeling. Because all of these words are BOUND to what the child can see and hear, they limit the child’s communicative functions to here and now. They are largely REDUNDANT with the child’s perception. We will call this form of “thinking/feeling” by Piaget’s name: syncretism. We will say that the groupings made by the child are really not groupings at all but heaps.

When the child uses words like “apple”, “cup”, “mug” or “water”, the child is thinking of OBJECTS. Because all of these words are NOT bound to what the child can see and hear, but are instead bound to PHYSICAL attributes of the objects themselves, they extend the child’s communicative functions outside what the child can see and hear. The child can now talk about things that are outside the sphere of his or her perception; he or she can talk about a  “cup of water” that is not there but that he or she wants to drink. However, the child’s thinking is now bound to objects; he or she cannot really talk about hopes and wishes, experiences and plans, past and future,

When the child uses words like “I like apples” or “I would like a cup of water”, the child is now thinking of , PROCESSES. These words are not bound to specific objects, but instead are true communicative functions the way we know them. The child can now talk about hopes and wishes, experiences and plans, past and future. Now, it is tempting to say the child’s mental development is finished, and I think that for some English teachers they would be perfectly happy here: the child is now ready to go on holiday in Japan and buy things to eat and drink.

However, from an “integrated functions” perspective, the child’s development has really only BEGUN. The child cannot (yet) see an apple as an example of a concept that is slightly different in English and in Korean (the Korean word for “fruit” includes nuts, but the English one does not). The child cannot understand water as a scientific phenomenon that includes Archimedes Law. And yet THAT kind of integration, the integration of communicative functions with the LESS communicative functions of THINKING in CONCEPTS, or our goal in elementary school teaching!