eric,
I'm not sure campaigning is allowed in the XMCA poll, but I just got my copy of Mind, Culture and Activity and I notice that the Park and Moro article directly addresses the issue of the integratedness (what other people on this list call the "situatedness") of verbal interaction.
But Park and Moro raise an issue that we've so far left out, which I think is key, namely INTENTIONALITY. Without intentionality, it is perfectly possible for linguists to imagine that the structure of language is the result of some kind of elemental self-organizing principle, akin to what we see in biochemistry or even animal behavior. .
What I really like about the article is the way Park and Moro manage to integrate intentionality and situation. By making it clear that intentionality is not simply a matter of the will but rather a matter of integrating the will and environmental affordances, they are able to overcome an apparent contradiction: LSV's firm conviction that learning comes about through interacting with the social environment created by teaching rather than directly, and LSV's equally firm conviction that the child does not "internalize" the culture of the social environment of learning but rather creates a new one.
This is a contradiction that really bothers me when I read LSV's textbook on "Educational Psychology", and it's for this reason I've always secretly witten it off as a bit of LSV's juvenilia. Anyway, maybe you won't have to pay through the nose to read Park and Moro (like I did) and we can continue our discussion of how language is integrated into non-language next month. I promise: I'm not recommending it because it's regional produce!
David
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