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

Literature I 46

child's skills and the type of social relationships: as skills become
more and more complex, relationships become inadequate and eventually
will pose limits to the development of skills; at that point a crisis will
erupt and new relationships will have to be established, thus marking the
beginning of a new stage. This model for ontogenesis, close to that
devised by Xarx to explain social history, has been translated into
graphic form using a mathematical construct called Catastrophe Theory
(Sutton,1980a).

The concept of activity

'Activity' is the most fundamental working concept in Soviet psychology
(Vertsch,1981). Human psychology studies the activities of concrete
individuals. Human activity is Integrated in the system of social
relations, as it uses objects, tools and psychological tools (l.e.signs)
historically developed. Activity Is the uniquely human form of rule-
governed, tool-mediated, goal-directed action: it Includes the motives, the
goals, and the conditions operating on the subject <Cole,1985a,
Vertsch,1985b). This may be seen an elaboration of Marx's famous
differentiation between the worst architect and the best of bees. Higher
mental functions are developed in the course of activity:

Any higher mental function was external because it was social at
some point before becoming an internal, truly mental function.
(Vygotsky ,1981:162)

The process of internalization is the bridge between external and
internal activity (Vygotsky,1978:28; Zinchenko,1985; Vertsch,1979), but:

... the process of internalization is not the transferal of an
external activity to a pre-existing, internal 'plane of
consciousness': it is the process in which this Internal plane is
formed. (Leont'ev,1975, quoted in Zinchenko,1985:107).

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