Re: Thinking in a foreign language

From: Huong Le (lehuon@student.vuw.ac.nz)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 13:00:56 PDT


Dear Mike,
Thank you for your vivid examples. I learned a lot from them. I think
I had similar experiences like yours when learning English. Can I ask
you another question? Your examples of mediated learning happened in
real activities and real rich L2 environment. How about the students
learning a foreign language out of environment or in their home
countries and the activities are usually from textbook? I think some
authors suggest 'authentic materials" and "authentic contexts", still
they are through the medium of a textbook of some kind. Students
learning a foreign language in their home country in this sense seem
to lack the multifacted mediated activities...Does this mean that it
is impossible for them to try to build up their thinking process in a
foreign language?
Huong

---- Original Message ----
From: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu (Mike Cole)
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Thinking in a foreign language
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:07:47 -0700 (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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