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

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today's Third or Fourth world Countries); even in more recent decades,
when she was confronted with the ambitious task of offering equal and
free education for all, a theory stressing the critical importance of
early experiences for later development could not be afforded in
economical and political terms:

The psychology that was to emerge would have not only to include
an optimistic view of the malleability of human potential,it would
also have to offer the theoretical tools whereby that potential
would be achieved, however unpromising might appear the initial
human material. (Sutton,1980b.∙200).

Today's underdeveloped countries cannot afford either a philosophy of
education or a psychology based on social and ontological determinism: it
would not be a case, as for industrialized countries, of promoting
compensatory programmes for groups with special needs, but of providing
'special' education programmes for the whole population, virtually all the
children suffering from symptoms related to 'deprivation' or 'mismatch'
syndromes.

In other aspects underdeveloped countries might find Vestern educational
psychology unfitting: they are not 'commodity-intensive' societies
(Illich,1983) and cannot afford the wealth of learning materials Involved
in much of the child-centred model of learning and schooling now
prevalent in the rich Vest; particularly in rural areas, adults represent
the main source of mediated knowledge, as oral culture dominates over
media; materials, which are not commodities, are used sparingly. The
teacher, often the most learned person in the village, is seen as an
agent of change, and he is expected to play a central role in the
classroom and in the community (see 6.1). And Independence, despite all
the problems, has set in motion a dynamic which probably is the opposite
of that of the 'old' world:

Just as we have come to accept the facts of poverty in the slums
of Korthem Philadelphia, we have come to accept that many children
will not learn to read, and will not make it^^our society. ...
Strangely enough, it is the rich society that believes that the
p∞r will always be with us, and the poor society that does not.
(Labov,1982:150).

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