Week 5: Выготский и Эксперты (Vygotsky and Experts)

I haven’t said much in my learning blogs about the social aspect of my Russian learning, but it is there, if only minimally. When I’m going over the Rosetta Stone lessons I will often ask my wife, a native Russian speaker, how to pronounce something or what a certain word means. The translation is helpful because RS does not give the English translations. I’m still thinking of how much this kind of social interaction relates to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. But there are other times, however, when my wife will quiz me on certain words, forcing me to recall them and helping to extend my potential. This also goes both ways because she always asks me how to pronounce a certain word in English or what a word means. For example, we made hot chocolate in a pot the other day and the directions said to stir it until it was “frothy,” but she had never heard that word before. I tried to explain what it meant, but since I’m an expert [recall the Ambrose article] in English, it can be challenging to explain what certain words are when I intuitively understand them. In this way I think the zone of proximal development is at work since she is learning something from me, and by me trying to explain it, I’m learning about how to explain and understand it in different terms. And I don’t know if the Ambrose article brought up the importance of the expert having patience, but I think it’s good to keep in mind. It’s helpful being on the novice end so that I am reminded of what it is like to learn something new and what I also expect from a teacher.

This is my effort to illustrate a combination of the ideas about learning from experts while using a sociocultural approach like legitimate peripheral participation or cognitive apprenticeship. Also notice how some of the matroyshka dolls are talking to each other and not just the expert in the middle.
Cool huh?

Back to the sociocultural aspect of this. After this weeks Lave and Wenger reading and the Brown et al article on situated learning, I’m wondering what these authors might say about language learning. They talk about how it is best to learn something in the context that you will use it in, so does that mean that I shouldn’t bother learning Russian outside of Russia (i.e., the context where I plan to use it)? Or that my learning Russian through Rosetta Stone will only be good within the context of Rosetta Stone? Would they discourage learning a language in a more structured, formal environment? They might discourage it, but would they think it’s useless? I’m not saying these authors don’t have an answer, I just don’t know what it is. The cognitivist would have an easy answer to this question, and it is that you can still store up things in your memory for use later on. My goal in learning Russian is to combine both of these theories in that I hope to give myself as much prior knowledge as I can so that it can then be retrieved when I am in a more appropriate context. In other words, when I go to Russia, I’m hoping I can recognize some of the things I’ve learned, and then figure out how to use my prior knowledge by observing others. And by the way, isn’t this also the aim of formal schooling and education? To help give us some basic knowledge and skills to get us started in the workplace environment? As much as I like the sociocultural approach and the idea of the cognitive apprentice, it still seems limited, which is no surprise since all these theories appear inadequate in different ways.