Re: Thinking in a foreign language

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 08:07:47 PDT


Huong-- The term "mental activity" in the quotation fromm AAL is ambiguous
to me because the term, "mental activity" is ambiguous. But lets suppose
that one takes a distributed cognition view of "mental activity" so that
it is distributed across the people, artifacts, and institutions with which
and within in which a person engages the world. Then, multifaceted would
refer to the range of interactions mediated by L2. And then the statement
has some implementable implications.

Let me give an example of my own (partial!) acquisition of Russian. I began
with a narrow range of activities: an intro language class and painfully
slow reading of a Luria text with dictionary in hand. Slowly I becamse able
to engage in a narrow range of halting conversations with teachers and to
make some interpretation of what I was reading.

In an intensive summer school, with many students, and a ban on speaking
English, the range of interactions mediated by Russian increased, but there
was an awful lot of "Renglish" being spoken, a sort of pidgen Russian with
a lot of English interpolated because the things we wish to communicate about
were well beyond my capacities.

In Russia I worked in a research lab with co-workers who could understand
English when Luria spoke it, but not when I did, and hospital patients who
could not speak it at all. And quickly my Russian became better than the
English of Russian acquaintances at the University. Luria would speak to me
only in Russian.

But it was exhausting and terribly incomplete. In serious conversations wtih
adults I always felt hugely incapable of expressing any nuance of what I
wanted to say. A few Russian friends became adept at interpreting my
lame attempts, but I was almost a total loss when speaking to little kids,
who had their own, totally non-academic vocabulary and interests of which
I was ignorant and an imability to scaffold my bumbling talk.

Had I spent more time in Russia working, say, in a preschool, the range of
activities which would come to be mediated by Russian would increase, and
with it my fluency.

To this day I speak and understand oral Russian better than I can read it
and far better than I can write it. By contrast, I have historian friends
for whom exactly the opposite is true.

Does this fit AAL's idea?
mike



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