Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Literature I 44

transcends artificial divisions between disciplines, and <b) it avoids the
two opposite traps of reductionism, whereby explanations of social
processes can be reduced to principles that govern individual phenomena,
or the opposite (Kohlberg and Vertsch,1981).

Vygotsky considered cognitive processes as 'internalized transformations
of socially prevalent patterns of interpersonal interaction'
(Cole,19θ5a.^,148). According to his 'General genetic law of cultural
development', any higher psychological function, including language, first
appears on the social ('inter-psychological') level, and only later on the
individual ('intra-psychological') level (Vygotsky,1978:57), as it is born
out of social relations. Cognitive development is treated as a process of
acquiring culture by participating in, and gradually mastering, social
interaction; the use of language, or more generally of signs, is central
in this transition from social to mental activity.

Ve place this transition from a social influence outside the
individual to a social influence within the individual at the center
of our research and try to elucidate the most important factors
that give rise to this transition. (Vygotsky, 196 O -a text in
Eussian quoted in Kohlberg and Vertsch,1981:36).

In contrast to Piaget, we hypothesize that development does not
proceed towards socialization but towards the conversion of social
relations into mental functions. (Vygotsky,1981:164).

As is well known, one of the main differences between Piaget and Vygotsky
is the different role they attribute to language in cognitive development:
for the latter, the introduction of linguistic mediation causes a major
qualitative change in the development of thought:

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual
development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of
practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and
practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of
development, converge. (Vygotsky,1978:24).

Both Piaget and Vygotsky attach a crucial importance to symbolic
thinking for cognitive development, but for Piaget language is not
decisive in the formation of the semiotic function, as priority is given
to action and construction.

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