Mediating between scientific and spontaneous concepts through languaging

Abstract

In this study, framed within a sociocultural theory of mind, we explore the role of languaging in mediating between students’ understanding of a grammatical concept and their written production of the forms related to that concept. The development of scientific concepts, in this case of the concept of voice in French, involves the use of language to mediate awareness and understanding of it, a process we call languaging. Using Vygotsky's distinction between scientific and spontaneous (everyday) concepts, we demonstrate the development of the grammatical concept of voice in French in which our two university-level participants progressed from no knowledge of voice to an emergent knowledge through languaging about a series of cards containing an explanation of the concept. The nature of this emergent knowledge was highlighted by the discrepancy in performance between written and oral modes of testing. Implications for teaching and testing are reviewed.

Keywords:

• awareness
• French grammar
• languaging
• scientific concepts
• sociocultural theory
• spontaneous concepts

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by a grant to Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (No. 410-04-2099). We wish to thank our participants and all those involved in the main study. For their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, we acknowledge with thanks Jim Lantolf and the Language Awareness

reviewers.

Notes

1. Rowlands (2000) makes the point that some scientific concepts do not have spontaneous counterparts. In the current paper we do not feel that this is an issue because it is clear that there is a correspondence between the scientific concept (the grammatical concept of voice) and spontaneous concepts (use of the relevant forms in French and English, intuitions about English and French grammar, and everyday knowledge of the world).

2. Vygotsky's experiments focused on concept formation in the development of children but the analogies he draws between spontaneous and scientific concepts and first and second language learning make the concepts applicable to adult learners too (see Lantolf & Thorne, 2006).

3. Core French is a French as a second language programme in which French is taught as a subject usually in short (20–40 minutes) daily instructional periods. Core French yields approximately 120 instructional hours per year.

4. Transcription conventions:

• [ ]             Transcriber's commentary

• <>            Pauses of more than 5 seconds (e.g. <8>)

• …              Pauses of less than 5 seconds

• -                   Incomplete utterance

• “ ”               Utterance read from a text

• bold                Emphasis

• italics            French

• underlining    Overlapped speech

5. Although there are four possible readings of pronominal verbs in French (Connors & Ouellette, 1996), FSL students often refer to all pronominal verbs as reflexive.

6. The labels that participants use likely were learned in school contexts but their use of these labels suggests that they are at the level of spontaneous rather than scientific concepts. This is implied by the participants’ misuse of the terms and their inability to generalise their use to new contexts.

7. While Marnie's example of a sentence in the active voice is correct (although it is not clear that she understands the semantics of active voice), her passive voice examples are incorrect (both are in active voice). A correct passive sentence would be ‘La voiture a été conduite par moi’ (The car was driven by me).

8. English does have a middle voice, considered intermediate between active and passive voices. In the middle voice the subject is non-agentive (as in passive voice) but the verb morphology is in that of the active voice (see Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999). Sentences in the middle voice use ergative change-of-state verbs (e.g. start) as in the example, ‘The class starts at noon’ (middle voice) vs. ‘The teacher starts the class at noon’ (active voice) vs. ‘The class is started by the teacher at noon’ (passive voice).

9. In Swain et al. (2009), we conducted correlational analyses using Kendall's tau for the data set of nine participants. The languaging units (LUs) in the languaging stage correlated significantly with the total scores on the immediate post-test and the stimulated recall. When Marnie and Michelle are removed from the analyses (N= 7), the LUs in the languaging stage also correlate significantly (τ = .616) with the written delayed post-test results (p< .05, one-tailed). Marnie and Michelle's performance on the written delayed post-test relative to their performance in the other measures was anomalously high.

10. Although the concept of voice in French is the focus of this study, we could argue that the activities in this study also marked the beginning of development of the (scientific) concept of voice in English.