Home › CTCP Resources › III. Instruction

B. Relate language to life

As a teacher, one of the key questions you may have to consider is “Why should people learn?” You may also wonder “what learning is” and “how learning can be facilitated” in your classroom. 

The first question is about the motive of learning. Is it for a higher grade in tests? Is it for a higher ability in getting things done? Or is it for a better understanding of our own lives? Your understanding of learning is largely defined by your response to this question, and it eventually influences your students’ perspectives and practices on learning.

Think about two hard-working students in your language teaching class. One studies assiduously but primarily to achieve a high grade while a classmate diligently studies to expand a communicative repertoire as it is needed for interpersonal social needs. Even though both students may memorize the same vocabulary lists and practice the same dialogues that are stipulated in their common syllabus, they are doing so to meet different needs, and hence we can say that different objects orient their behavior. So the activity of each student is different as it is driven by a divergent motive: One is to obtain a high grade, and the other one is to achieve/maintain fulfilling social interaction. We may also expect that the learning outcomes of these two activities, in the form of long-term retention and performance differences, would be significant.

From the example above, did you see how the latter two questions about “what learning is” and “how learning can be facilitated” are predetermined by people’s motive about “why should we learn”? These three questions form a structure of human’s activities posited by the Activity Theory, which has been widely used in theorizing teaching and learning foreign languages.

According to Vygotsky, Leont’ev, and Engestrom, founders of Activity Theory, the key idea is that mind emerges as a special component of human interaction with the environment. Activity is how learners—as agents—construct the task. Specifically, the child learns from activities that society has constructed and placed value on. The child interacts with the sociocultural environment through the mediation of tools, such as language, cultural artifacts, and established procedures. Vygotsky strengthened that the subject (human) cannot act directly on the object (external world) but rather employs tool mediation to carry out cognitive and material functions. There are three levels of activity during this process of mediated interaction between subject and object: activity (why), action (what), and operation (how):

  1. The highest level is activity: This level of activity is linked to the concept of motive, which specifies what is to “maximized” in a setting. It tells us that the individual is functioning in a socio-culturally defined context.
  2. The second level is action: This level is subordinated to a concrete goal. It tells us about the means-end relationship involved. Goals are not physical objects but phenomena of “anticipatory reflection”. Goals are not stable. Individuals have the agency to change, postpone, or abandon the goals.
  3. The third level is operational level: This level largely determines the means, physical or mental, through which an action is carried out; they are bound to the actual circumstances and conditions under which a goal is realized. The same goal can be achieved through a different set of operations. An essential feature of operations is that they usually become automatized procedures, but once they attain this status, they do not necessarily remain so forever.

   
In order to understand these three levels, let us elaborate on the example above. The students mentioned above were engaged in different motives of learning: “taking tests” and “communicative capability” respectively. So they take different actions accordingly: one tried every means to raise his test scores, and the other strived for a more fluent communicative ability. Thus, their operations were utterly different. One tried to memorize every word, sentence and grammar that were targeted for testing. The other made pen pals online and used the words and sentences learned in class to converse with native speakers. In this process, the language is both the medium and the purpose of learning. Activity theorists believe that by purposefully and meaningfully using the mediating tools, we can actively interact with the external settings and approach the expected outcome. In this process of interacting with external settings and approaching the outcome, the mediating tools are also being polished and refined. Hence, in the foreign language learning classroom, the targeted language can be both acquired and effectively applied in the meantime as students are engaged in purposeful and meaningful activities.

In addition, the other mediating tool is the more capable other who can help students to reach the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). ZPD is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable others (Vygotsky, 1978, p.86). Usually, the teacher and the peers can be the capable others. According to the Activity Theory, as a teacher, you may have to guide your students to work through the carefully designed activities in order to help them achieve the level of their potential development. In addition, Activity Theory also suggests that learning, as an activity system (s), requires interaction within a community. According to Leont’ev, activity is socially mediated: consciousness and meaning are always formed in joint, collective activity (Leontjev 1978). That is, individuals acquire rules and knowledge in the process of interacting with each other and working on the external objects via mediating tools. This process can be illustrated in the framework in Figure 1 below.


                  

                     Figure 1. Framework of Activity Theory

Now look at Figure 1, please think about following key points of Activity Theory:

  1. Within activity theory (and the cultural-historical approach more broadly), issues of mediation, the internalization-externalization dialectic, and object-orientedness (treating social and cultural properties as objective and meaningful) are fundamental elements.
  2. The transformation of an object (a material object/artifact, a plan, a shared goal, an idea) into an outcome motivates an activity
  3. Activity systems are not static or purely descriptive; rather, they imply transformation and innovation
  4. All activity systems are heterogeneous and multi-voiced and may include conflict and resistance as readily as cooperation and collaboration; Contradictions within and between activity systems drive development
  5. There is no ‘student-’ or ‘teacher-’ centered pedagogy from an activity theory perspective
  6. Activity systems do not operate independently. Multiple activity systems are always relevant, to varying degrees, and part of the analyst’s obligation is to understand how exogenous systems influence the focus system(s) under investigation. (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p.226)

Does it make sense? What do all these imply for your teaching? Now think about how you can apply Activity Theory into your teaching. Following are a few examples. You can develop your own.
-- Design activities that are related to students’ daily lives. For instance, teach colors and shape by tasting and discussing about fruits.
-- Scaffold students’ in meaningful projects and guide them learn vocabulary and grammar by doing the project in learning groups. For instance, you may scaffold your students to design a tour guide for their future visit to the country speaking targeted language.

 

Resources: