Sure, Andy!
This is from Luciano Meccaci's translation of "Thinking and Speech",
Chapter Six:
"If we may say so, the assimilation of a foreign language raises the
level of the maternal language (rech) for the child as much as the
assimilation of algebra raises to a higher level the child’s
arithmetic thinking, because it permits the child to understand any
arithmetical operation as a particular case of algebraic operations,
furnishing the child a freer, more abstract, more generalized and at
the same time more profound and rich view of operations on concrete
quantitites. Just as algebra frees the thinking of the child from its
dependence on concrete numbers and raises it to a higher level of more
generalized thinking, in the same way the assimilation of a foreign
language in completely diverse ways frees verbal thinking from the
grip of concrete forms and concrete phenomena of language."
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On *Fri, 7/1/11, Andy Blunden /<ablunden@mira.net>/* wrote:
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Numbers - Natural or Real?
To: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, July 1, 2011, 10:53 PM
Can you give us your reference here David, in a pubished
translation of Vygotsky?
andy
David Kellogg wrote:
> ... I don't think that quantity IS the basic concept in
mathematics, though. Vygotsky is pretty clear about this: just a
preschooler has to be able to abstract actual objects away from
groups in order to form the idea of abstract quantity, the
schoolchild has to be able to abstract quantities away from
numbers in order to form the idea of RELATIONS between quantities,
or OPERATORS.
>
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