Here is an English synopsis I wrote (June 1998) for
the bilingual discussion list 5tadim who-is-at siu.buap.mx:
Ferreiro starts by locating the publishing of Luria and Vygotsky in the
West in her own professional history, suggesting that she and her
colleagues came to many of the same insights as Luria, without having read
him. They had read Vygotsky, but later became aware that it was Luria who
had conducted experiments with the development of writing.
Ferreiro states that while Luria's methods were loose by today's
scientific standards, they were similar to Piaget's from the same era.
What is impressive in Luria's work for Ferreiro is that he gives attention
to pre-writing, specifically marks or scribbles on paper. She finds this
extraordinary for the time in which he was writing. It is in the
importance of pre-writing that Ferreiro feels similar to Luria. She also
concurs with Luria that there are stages in the process of development of
writing. However, she argues that she and Luria differ in the number of
stages and the means of distinguishing them as well as the process of
movement from one stage to another.
Ferreiro holds that the differences between her and Luria lie in the
questions they ask. According to Ferreiro, Luria sees writing as a skill
or technique used instrumentally to produce memory aides or communication.
The development of the skill takes place in stages in a process in which
the more advanced skill substitutes for the earlier skill, which is then
forgotten or lost. Ferreiro discusses Luria's work with the pictographic
stage, which then moves to the symbolic stage when the child goes to
school. School signifies a rupture with previous knowledge. (Ferreiro has
an interesting footnote, 5 on p. 125, in which she tries to account for
Luria's and Vygotsky's "marked optimism toward schooling.")
Luria's questions, per F., are predicated upon the perspective of an
adult's instrumental use of writing and do not consider writing in terms
of the developing subject. Per F., for Luria, writing's function for the
subject is subordinated to its social-historical instrumentality. Thus,
his experiments often dealt with accelerating movement into the
pictographic stage, which would provide evidence of more rapid development
toward a socially established norm.
Ferreiro argues that the "norm" was actually external to the process, in
this case a norm based on Luria's model of the development of writing.
She does not agree that the pictographic stage precedes the conceptual
or symbolic stage and does not agree that substitution of the more
advanced skill correlates with loss of previous knowledge. She argues that
her questions are based on the perspective that writing is an object with
a particular form of existence in the socio-cultural context. (p. 123).
Her guiding question is: What form of object is writing for the child who
is in the process of development. She is not sure that
mnemonic/communicative instrumentality is an adequate understanding of
writing. She offers the case of royal seals that are emblems of
authority and do not correspond to linguistic systems. Later she argues
that in phylogeny, the syllabic forms of representation preceded phonetic
or alphabet systems and that these may provide a closer parallel (not
recapitulation) to the development of writing in the child. She is not
convinced that school represents an rupture with previous knowledge,
preferring the notion of interaction between what was before and
schooling. She says she has, in fact, demonstrated this, while Luria
never supported his understanding experimentally.
In the second part of the article, F. argues that children come to
writing in a socio-cultural context which has included reading. Her
research with children's understanding of writing points to a magical and
mysterious process where marks in a book can make adults "talk the book."
Children become aware that the marks are systematic, allowing the book
to speak the same words through different people and at different times.
Therefore, F. argues, the adult reader (interpretant) guides the child's
(interpretee's) developing understanding (interpretation) of writing as
a system for linguistic representation. F. argues that this process
parallels the development of syllabic systems,i.e. systems of linguistic
representation that are iconic in nature, not pictographic systems (which
I think she would classify as indexical because they represent the object
portrayed not the symbolic representation of that object as part of a
symbolic system). She adds that the skills of the pictographic stage are
not lost, but continue to develop as a mode of graphic representation,
i.e., a separate developmental process.
Honorine Nocon,
UCSD/LCHC