ForVygotsky, interaction and reflectiveness play central roles in language
development and in the context Offoreign language learning he argued that the
learning of such a language helped the chid in mastering the 'higher forms',
phonetic and syntactical, of his first language:
"The child learns to see his language as one particular system among many, to
view its phenomena under more general categories, and this leads to
awareness of his linguistic operations." (Vygotsky, 1962: Ti09)
A study reported by Pinto, Taeschner & Titone (1996) also points to the
potential benefits of a more ’reflective' approach to language learning. This
study was carried out amongst Patois-Italian speaking children from low
socio-economic and socio-cultural backgrounds. They were taught a Patois,
their home dialect and Ital an, the official language of the region, as well as
English on a daily basis. Work focused on themes that were common to all
three languages including images, songs and rhymes and written language was
introduced in all three languages from the beginning with pupils comparing
pronunciation and orthography patterns. When children were assessed in
∞mparison to a control group who had attended a monolingual curriculum only,
researchers found that:
"...those who had followed a more demanding Iinguistc curriculum,
entailing a high risk of possible interferences and confusions among different
code systems, were in fact superior in Italian metalinguistic tasks to those who
only attended an Italian curriculum" (Pinto et al., 1996: 44)
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