[Xmca-l] Re: Dynamics of Developmental Change

[Lplarry]

Henry,
I want to return to your dissertation where development seemed linked to *decontextualization" and segment in order to acquire *systematic* (and possibly conscious) CONTROL.
How do you respond to van Oers who questions the adequacy of the notion of (de)contextualization.
He is making a case for (re) contextualization as more accurately describing development as what I might term meta(contextual).
Contextualizing previous contexts



-----Original Message-----
From: "HENRY SHONERD" <hshonerd@gmail.com>
Sent: ‎2015-‎09-‎10 5:09 PM
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Dynamics of Developmental Change

Mike and David,
This may be a diversion from what you are getting at regarding intersubjectivity, but I was web surfing on the "fallacy of decontextualized measurement”. I came up with the attached article in Mind, Culture and Activity by Bert van Oers. ( I believe it was originally published in 1998 then appeared on line in Mind, Culture and Activity in 2009.Interestingly the title is misspelled in the heading that precedes the article, changing decontextualization to detextualization. A Freudian slip?) van Oers is pushing back on Wertsch’s construal of decontextualization. What makes me think this article is one David might have been thinking of was the shoe measurement game documented in the article. 

The article raises, for me, the issue of the relationship between learning and development at any age, in school or out. Many years ago, my dissertation on L2 learning focused on such learning strategies as vocabulary memorization, which I take to be a form of decontextualization and potentially useful for the use of L2 for real time communication. It seems to me that, if the application is successful, you are moving from learning to development. Even L1 development shows signs of metalinguistic awareness at an early age: the ability to segment and decontextualize the flow of speech. Babbling, which profiles the phonological potential of language, is apparently “wired in”: even profoundly deaf children do it, though babbling dies out in deaf children. Evidently there is controversy as to whether babbling in infants is continuous with the articulation later on of speech. 

If this is not entirely off topic, I wonder if anyone wants to comment. 

Henry