Phillip,
Thanks for those thoughts. I have just begun reading the small amount of
literature on play in the second language classroom, and concur entirely
with what you say...I was being a little harsh on the activity by calling
it inauthentic (a pretty controversial term in foreign/second language
education). My dilemma was finding a point of departure for using Activity
Theory (as a newcomer to applying it to my own classroom-based research).
Extending Vygotsky's view of child play as activity that creates a zone of
proximal development in which the child behaves beyond his/her day-to-day
capabilities and boundaries to adult play/theatre in the language learning
classroom is certainly an area worth exploring.
I'll look into Keith Sawyer's work.
Phil
At 19:50 18/11/02 -0700, you wrote:
> Phil, i've been considering your question over the
> weekend - one way of
>positioning the activity is under the concept of "play" or "theater" -
>there's lots of work on children's play (Keith Sawyer is an activity
>theorist who has looked at children's play. and of course vygotsky was
>intrigued by the theater - wrote about Hamlet.
>
> but i think that this is a good example of imaginary work -
> visualizing a
>practice - before actually practicing it out in the community. i think
>that it's a mistake to think that the classroom is an inauthentic context
>- it's quite an authentic context with an enormously complex cultural
>history - it's the activities within the context that would be authentic
>or inauthentic, i think.
>
> and it looks to me like this was an authentic activity.
>
>phillip
>
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