This afternoon, in a totally different context, a colleague mentioned
with interest that his grandchild was currently over-regularizing past
tenses. For example, she insists on adding the "ed" morpheme to the
irregular past tense of "walk" to produce "walkted". Such
overregularizations of both verbs and nouns are a common feature of
the learning of English at around the age of two-and-a-half to three
years. The question is: how do we account for utterances that contain
such forms that are not heard in the child's speech community?
>From an LPP point of view, it seems reasonable to argue that the
utterances in which such forms occur are contributed as part of some
practice in which the child is engaged with a co-participant. From this
perspective, learning to talk as a whole is an integral aspect of
increasingly full participation in interaction with others in a range
of community practices. But, in order to account for the anomalous
forms, it seems to me that one has to invoke the notion of individual
resources that are deployed by each participant in the interaction -
resources that are certainly appropriated from the experience of
_social_ interaction, but then transformed by the individual in terms of
tacit "rules" that are constructed by the child and which give rise to
utterances that are (somewhat trivially, it is true, and only
temporarily) maladapted to social interaction. Though it's also the case
that minor transformations of language in each new generation's
appropriation of the cultural sign-system lead to language change over
the course of generations.
Extrapolating from this small, but well-documented, phenomenon, doesn't
the learning that occurs in participation in joint activity always involve
some degree of transformation of, and addition to, the resources of the
individual? I want to say knowledge that the individual has constructed
and "has" at his or her disposal, whether or not it is actually deployed
in further joint activity. (I realize that this is a minefield I am
entering - hence the scare quotes around "has".) Perhaps "internalization"
is not a helpful concept; "mastery" (as I think Wertsch has suggested)
may be better. But in either case what is at issue is the notion of the
individual as a person with knowledge - a rich and unique potential for
participation, constructed in the course of a unique trajectory of
engagement in social practices of many kinds.
It is certainly important to characterize learning as "a process of
transformation of participation itself" (Rogoff, 1994). But to describe
persons _only_ in terms of their participation (peripheral or more central)
- as elements in an activity system - and ignore their unique potential
as individuals, seems to me to miss an important part of the whole to be
explained.
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.