Spontaneous, unspontaneous concepts and conscious instruction.


  1. Summary of the main difference between spontaneous and unspontaneous concept

  1. Mediation role of well developed concepts
Vygotsky emphasizes the development of scientific concepts required the existence of rich and well developed spontaneous concepts. Imagine a teacher is teaching grammar of a second language. If a teacher reads out the explanation of the grammar structure on the textbook verbatim, a student may not be able to understand the structure as it will be difficult to build connections to the "words" in explanation.
This reminds me some principles that are often mentioned in teaching L2 grammar, given- to-new, awareness, and the real-operating conditions principle (Batstone& Ellis, 2009). Given- to-new principle emphasize the new grammar information given to students should be relevant to them. The process of how students making connection to the grammar information is to activate their schematic knowledge of what they have already known about the world. The awareness refers to make learners attentive to the grammatical form encoded in the concepts.  The real-operating conditions points out that students need to participate in meaning-focused interaction and improve performance with feedback in order to achieve language accuracy.

  1. Instruction
  • Direct instruction of concept is impossible. Verbalism only teach the words, replacing words for words, which only provides incomprehensible input. In second language teaching, providing input is just the first step, but how much student understand depends on how much they "intake", which requires students to be aware of the input and incorporate the information in to the developing system.

  • The procedures of developing scientific concept requires conscious instruction. From my understanding, it refers to the instruction that a teacher provides when he is aware the strategies he will use to interact wit students. The strategies are tailored to students' cognitive development in which scientific concept is chunked into small and comprehensible piece, as to help student to overcome the inadequate capacity in understanding it as a whole. It's through scaffolding and students' operation on the scientific concept in a voluntary manner that move the scientific concept to the next stage.


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