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

Literature I 48

child's relative level), but at the level of potential development (upper
limit of ZPD). The adult must recognize the child's striving towards
change, change his relationship towards him, provide new and more
complex types of activities in which the child can test his new skills.
Educational Intervention is geared towards establishing contradictions
rather than achieving equilibrium.

The relationship between learning and development is seen as one where
learning must lead development:

Vhat the child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone
tomorrow. Therefore the only good kind of instruction is that which
marches ahead of development and leads it; it must be aimed not so
much at the ripe as at the ripening functions. (Vygotsky,1962:104).

Some decades later, studies on early language acquisition have in a sense
confirmed this: the child develops communication and language as a result
of the mother considering him a competent conversationalist, reading
meanings in his first verbal exercices, treating them as if they were
communicative (McTear,1985; Snow,1977). The 'enabling, sustaining' mother
(Velis,1981) uses direct request forms, for example, well beyond the
child's ability to understand them :

... it is as if adults were tutoring the child on how to interpret
communicative moves ... they use directives which require a
definition of the situation somewhat beyond the child's level, and
then coach the child on how to respond. (Vertsch.1979:20).

Cole's redefinition of ZPD as 'the structure of joint activity in any
context where there are participants who exercise differential
responsibility by virtue of differential expertise' (Cole,1985a:155) seems
particularly effective in this context.

Considering now the problems connected with the initiation to literacy,
this is considered in Soviet psychology as a 'developmental crisis': it is
the passage from 'everyday, spontaneous concepts' (where the iconic
relationship among objects in the context still structures the subject's
activity) to 'scientific' concepts, in which

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