Re: which snow?
Joan Kelly Hall (JKHALL who-is-at uga.cc.uga.edu)
Mon, 11 Sep 95 20:25:16 EDT
Hi Mike Cole: As I read her, the bottom line is that language
acquisition is task/context specific (see C. Snow. 1991. Diverse
conversational contexts for the acquisition of various language skills.
In J. Miller, ed. Research on Child Language Disorders: A decade of
progress. for a summary of her model). Her work fits in quite nicely
with the (can I say neo-) vygotskyan perspective that learning leads
development (as well as other similar lines of thought such as that
coming from Ochs' work, e.g., her 88 book on culture and lang.
development) and she - Snow - shows in very specific ways how what is
acquired is inextricably connected to the context(s) of its use. Her
work comparing L1 and L2 acquisition makes even clearer the connection.
In one article, e.g,. "Giving formal definitions: A linguistic or
metalinguistic skill?" In E. Bialystok, (ed.), Language Processing in
Bilingual Children, she and her colleagues found that the specific
linguistic skills acquired in L2, if not also acquired in L1, are
strongly related to the linguistic input they receive in L2. There is
another equally interesting study done by Wu, Snow and a few others that
appears in one of the 94 issues of Discourse Processes. It's all nice
stuff, and while I'm more concerned with the acquisition of pragmatics
in L2, I find her frames/findings/model very useful for looking at
classroom talk and L2/FL acquisition.
Does this jibe with your thinking on her work?
Joan
Joan Kelly Hall
University of Georgia