Thorne: Cultural historical activity theory and the object of innovation

NOTE: A published version of this paper is to appear in New Insights into Foreign Language Learning and Teaching. Oliver St. John, Kees van Esch, & Eus Schalkwijk (eds). Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt (Germany).

This is a tremendously exciting time to be a language educator if also one that poses numerous challenges. At the fore in applied linguistics are such issues as globalization and its effects on language teaching (Cameron & Block, 2001; Kramsch & Thorne, 2001), colonial histories and the politics of language (Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 1998), and the broad focus of this chapter, cultural-historical approaches to language education that make explicit the linkages between an individual’s development and the social-material conditions of their everyday practice (e.g., Engeström, 1999; Chaiklin, 2001; in second language research, Lantolf, 2000; Swain, 2000; Thorne, 2000). To borrow a phrase from Ron Scollon (2001:5), and especially relevant in this tumultuous time of political volatility and conceptual change in the field, language educators are located in a “nexus of practice”, a site of engagement inextricably linked to multiple other participants, practices, and histories.

Numa Markee, well known for his creative pedagogical efforts in second language education and book length treatment on curricular innovation (1997), emphasizes that “the study of how to effect educational change should be part of the basic intellectual preparation of all language teaching professionals” (1997:4). Effecting educational change, however, can be difficult on a number of levels. Institutional inertia, the need to align with other courses being taught, and standard expectations within the curriculum, are all factors that may either mitigate or make possible pedagogical innovation. Additionally, teaching approaches come into and out of vogue. Educational goals are transformed to meet the evolving needs of an increasingly diverse student population. New technologies emerge and are incorporated into everyday practices of teaching and learning. Historically, language educators have witnessed radical pedagogical shifts such as the wide-spread move from the grammar-translation to the audio-lingual method in the 1950s and 60s and the overwhelming trend toward “communicative language teaching” in the 1980s and 90s (Breen & Candlin, 1980; Savignon, 1983).

From the classroom instructor’s perspective, ‘change’ as such can seem to lack an identifiable agency, or can even preclude an individual instructor’s creativity and voice. A few questions are relevant here, and they are only partially rhetorical -- where does educational innovation come from? Is it filtered down through second language acquisition (SLA) research? Or from pedagogical texts? Perhaps change is imposed by a departmental authority? With many traditional educational approaches being challenged within applied linguistics (e.g., Pennycook, 2001) and elsewhere (e.g., Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), how can language educators positively transform their everyday activity as instructors and facilitators?

In response to these aforementioned questions, I will suggest a version of cultural-historical activity theory based on the work of Yrjö Engeström. Engeström’s model of activity theory has been used equally as a research framework and a heuristic supporting innovation in wide array contexts including education (Bellamy, 1996; Engeström, 1987; Thorne, 1999), healthcare (Engeström, 1993; Engeström, Engeström, Vähäaho, 1999), the postal service (Engeström & Escalante, 1996), and human-computer interaction (Kaptelinin, 1996). Activity theory does not separate understanding (research) from transformation (concrete action). That is, it encourages engaged critical inquiry wherein an investigation should afford an analysis that would lead to the development of material and symbolic-conceptual tools necessary to enact positive interventions. In fact, if we adhere to the Marxist principle on which the theory is based, as Vygotsky notes, we don’t really understand something unless we are able to transform it (see Bakhurst, 1991).

A potential challenge to the use of activity theory is that it requires practitioners to conceptually move away from student or teacher or technology-centered conceptions of educational practice, and to rather consider the goings on in a classroom or school as an activity system. The problem in general with ‘centering’ approaches is that human activity is mediated in complex ways that typically involve other people and artifacts. A student-centered or technology-centered analysis may put into shadow the important roles that the “non-centered” actors play in educational settings, such as the instructor, curricular orientation, and low-tech artifacts (pen and paper, books, chalk board/white board, the spatial configuration of the classroom), all of which may be critical to first understanding, and subsequently improving, educational practice. Nardi notes that it is not possible to fully understand how people learn and work if the unit of analysis is “the unaided individual with no access to other people or to artifacts for accomplishing the task at hand” (Nardi, 1996:69). Yet because of the privileging of the individual as an autonomous being, some have assumed that real learning must be a-social and therefore unassisted. This is part of the doxa, if not orthodoxa[1], of SLA research, and certainly of assessment efforts, which typically ask what individuals can accomplish alone and not what can be accomplished under more typical conditions of collaboration and interaction with other people and artifacts.

Through an activity theoretical lens, one can look at orientations toward the activity at hand, and the varying roles that participants and artifacts play, without the blind spots that teacher, student, and technology-centered approaches tend to produce. Activity theory understands individuals and their goal directed activity as the focus of analysis and the key to transformation and innovation. Activity theory provides a framework that stresses human agency, but a human agency mediated by the mediational means at hand (technologies like computers and books, and also semiotic tools such as literacies, pedagogical frameworks, and conceptions of learning), the communities relevant to the situation, the implicit and explicit rules and divisions of labor in these communities, and the object, or orientation, of the activity system under consideration. A strength of activity theory is its inherent dialectical sensitivity to the inventiveness of human activity and the normalizing pressures of expected forms of behavior.

I will briefly discuss how activity theory might be of particular use to language educators, and will do so by first describing the evolution of activity theory (culminating in the model developed by Yrjö Engeström, 1987, 1999) and how this approach can act as a defamiliarizing technology (Tschili, 1994), as a way for educators and students to view the language education process in a new light, and subsequently to enact innovations in the teaching and learning local to a given context. This chapter focuses specifically on the agency of teachers in their efforts to develop, implement, and assess educational innovation as illustrated by a case study of activity theory at work in second language education.

As Lantolf points out in his chapter (this volume), Vygotsky came to understand that higher order cognitive functions are culturally mediated by the signs and artifacts emergent of practical activity (1978, 1986; Cole, 1996). Higher order cognitive functions, including intentional memory, planning, voluntary attention, interpretive strategies, and forms of logic and rationality, develop in a way that correlates to social practices such as schooling, interaction with primary care givers, the learning and use of semiotic systems such as spoken languages, textual and digital literacies, mathematics, music, exposure to folk and “scientific” concepts, context-contingent behavioral norms, and spatial fields such as the social and functional divisions of built structures and visual artistic expression. All of these (and more, this is obviously a partial list) are uniquely human social-semiotic systems (e.g., Halliday, 1978) that evolved over time and continue to transform from generation to generation. They comprise our cultural inheritance, so to speak. Emphasizing that development moves, as it were, from the outside in, a primary Vygotskian argument is that development first occurs on an interactional and inter-mental plane (between individuals and between individuals and artifacts) and subsequently is available to individuals on an intra-mental plane. This links thought structures of individuals and communities to the social and material conditions of their everyday practice. To put this into modern parlance, Vygotsky argued that situated social interaction connected to concrete practical activity in the material world is at the source of both individual and cultural development, and in turn, cultural-societal structures provide affordances and constraints that result in the development of specific forms of consciousness (see Lantolf, this volume, for an extended discussion of mediation and internalization). This dialectical approach to the relation between subject and structure continues today to be at the core of sociological and psychological inquiry (e.g., theories of structuration, c.f., Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Archer, 1995) and is the corner stone of cultural historical activity theory.

Activity theory picks up Vygotsky’s main ideas and attempts to operationalize and extend his brilliant, if also arguably nascent, work. Kuutti (1996:25) describes activity theory as “a philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework for studying different kinds of human practices as development processes, with both individual and social levels interlinked at the same time.” First mentioned by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach as “practical-critical activity” (1968:659, also Engeström, 1999:3), the notion of activity is central to this approach and is defined as goal directed action that is often habitual in nature.[2]

The intellectual roots of cultural historical psychology (which, according to Chaiklin, 2001, subsumes sociocultural theory and activity theory) extend back to 18th and 19th century German philosophy (particularly Kant to Hegel), the sociological and economic writings of Marx and Engels (specifically Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology) and most directly to the research of Vygotsky and his colleagues Luria and Leontiev. In contrast to the engineering-computational metaphor used in varieties of SLA, which have defined themselves and the processes they look at through terminology such as input, output, uptake, etc. (and the use and learning of language understood as ‘information processing’), cultural historical psychology, though inclusive of a few lineages that variably emphasize divergent (but generally commensurate) intellectual traditions, seeks relational, historical, and non-dualist ways of reconceptualizing ‘learning’ and ‘behavior’ as ‘development’ and ‘practice’. Within education broadly, cultural historical psychology has stimulated a shift from a focus on brain-local cognitive function to an appreciation of human developmental processes as interrelated with and contingent upon historical, cultural, institutional, and discursive contexts.

Though individual and collective development emerges through life-long interaction with types and qualities of activities, settings, and artifacts, Vygotsky stressed that individuals dynamically use symbolic and material resources in new and innovative ways and notes evidence for this creative force by the frequency with which humans alter and transform their social and material environments and themselves (1978). This gets us to the point of this paper – to consider ways to improve language education through innovation and reasoned transformation. Creativity and innovation are at the core of the activity theory enterprise. Though activity theory is also used descriptively and analytically as a diagnostic framework, its essence is to then take a situation or condition and transform it in an effort to create something better. To borrow an often quoted line from Marx, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Theses on Feuerbach, XI, in Tucker (ed.), 1972:145).

An activity system is defined by Engeström as “not only a persistent formation; it is also a creative, novelty-producing formation …” (Engeström, 1993: 68). A particular educational context, for example, is itself a part of a number of activity systems relevant to participating individuals (for example their prior experiences with computer technology and on-line communities or their prior experience with foreign language learning), as well as the activity system of the semester-long class, the activity system of the practice of being a student at a university, the goals of this effort, and so on. Importantly, a single activity system is influenced by multiple other activity systems. In this way, an activity system such as a second language classroom may be influenced by other educational contexts as well as activity systems not directly related to education (for example, students’ experiences using foreign language for work or travel, perceptions and valuations of foreign cultures as they are represented in popular culture and media, the goals and aspirations of a student and the relevance (or perceived irrelevance) of their educational experience).

Practice, sometimes with a modifier as in “educational practice” or “social practice”, is a concept developed by social scientists (Bourdieu, 1990; de Certeau, 1984; Ortner, 1984) and linguists (Hanks, 1996; Scollon, 2001) to describe social action in the world. In this text, “practice” is used in the sense associated with Bourdieu (1977; 1990) to mean everyday, often habitual action that is informed by socially structured resources and competencies.

Mediation is a primary feature of activity theory and cultural historical psychology more generally and is the assertion that humans do not act directly on the world. Rather, their actions are mediated by social-semiotic tools (language, numeracy, concepts, etc) and material artifacts and technologies. Language and other semiotic systems mediate thinking and communicative interaction among people as well intra-mentally within an individual (for example subvocalization and private speech). The cultural historical perspective marks a radical epistemological shift from Cartesian derived theories of cognition and development that separate forms of knowledge from social practice. The key to this shift away from Cartesian dualism is the notion of mediation and internalization in which the mediational means are themselves cultural tools and artifacts (Cole & Engeström, 1993; Engeström, 1999; Wertsch, 1998; for a discussion of mediation within SLA, see Lantolf, 2000, and Lantolf, this volume). What might be termed habits of mind are emergent of social-material conditions in which concrete activities are carried out. This is not a deterministic relationship that can be precisely predicted; rather, the suggestion is that historical, institutional, and discursive forces (e.g., culture at given point in time and for specific communities) largely mediate an individual’s practical and symbolic activity.

Vygotsky initially advanced a model that included a subject and his or her object of activity. The subject cannot act directly on the object but rather employs tool mediation to carry out cognitive functions. The diagram often used to illustrate this relationship is the basic triangle. In Vygotsky’s work, tool mediation, located at the vertex of the triangle, affords and constrains cognition. The common reformulation of Vygotsky’s model of mediated action is depicted in Figure 1 (see also Engeström, 1999).

Though useful as a model of individual cognitive functioning that observes the critical role of cultural mediation, this schematic fails to include critical societal dynamics such as communities, the rules that structure them, and “the continuously negotiated distribution of tasks, powers, and responsibilities among the participants of an activity system.” (Cole & Engeström, 1993:7). Building on this critique, initially voiced by Leontiev (e.g., 1981), Engeström (1987) increased the scope of Vygotsky’s model to incorporate these societal and contextual dimensions. Engeström begins this broadening process by linking the idea of activity systems to the concept of context, stating that “[c]ontexts are activity systems. An activity system integrates the subject, the object, and the instruments (material tools as well as signs and symbols) into a unified whole” (Engeström, 1993:67).

The modern incarnation of activity theory provides a productive framework for mapping the complexities of social practice in educational settings. The central concern of this approach is that the actions of individuals occur at the nexus of three factors; the tools and artifacts available (e.g., languages, computers), the community and the understood rules of the community (historical and institutional rules as well as rules that are emergent of a local set of social-material conditions), and the division of labor in these community-settings (e.g., identity and social role, expected interactional dynamics). Engeström identifies the participants and processes of an activity system as subject, object and outcomes, community, division of labor, and rules. To schematize these relationships, Engeström developed the following diagram (1987, 1993, 1999).

This diagram depicts the core features of an activity system. A strength of an activity theoretical approach is the conception of human activity as indivisible from functional activity systems. The areas at the base of Engeström’s diagram--the community, rules, and division of labor--provide a conceptual framework that brings together local human activity and larger social-cultural-historical structures. In the upper part of the diagram the subject and his or her goal directed activity is shown to be mediated (made possible) by certain tools and artifacts. In more detail, a subject is an individual or subgroup whose agency is, in the emic sense, the perspective or point of view of the analysis. The object describes the orientation of the activity. Engeström explains that the “object refers to the ‘raw material’ or ‘problem space’ at which the activity is directed and which is molded or transformed into outcomes with the help of physical and symbolic, external and internal tools”, which mediate the activity (1993:67). The community is the participants who share the same object that shapes and lends direction to the individual and shared activity at hand. Of particular value to this study is Engeström's inclusion of division of labor to the activity theory approach. With a clear link to activity theory’s outgrowth of Marx and Engels’ work, division of labor refers to the horizontal actions and interactions among the members of the community and “to the vertical division of power and status” (Engeström, 1993:67), for example the differing status of more and less popular students or between teachers and students. The division of labor within a community involves rules and regulational norms, each of which afford and constrain the goings on within a functional activity system. Synoptically, here are a few key points about activity theory that stand out as especially pertinent to the process of educational innovation:

5 The Case of Peer-Revision in a Spanish Foreign language program

Antonio Jiménez and Gabriela Zapata, graduate student instructors of Spanish at Pennsylvania State University, created and implemented an intervention that they hoped would be developmentally productive for participating foreign language students of Spanish (unpublished manuscript). They reviewed the research literature on the use of peer revision in second language education between expert and novice writers (e.g., Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994) and between novices themselves (e.g., de Guerrero & Villamil, 1994, 2000) and were inspired by the forms of interaction reported in these studies. Within foreign language education in particular, Zapata and Jiménez found no existing research that discussed the use of peer revision in which more and less capable students, in disparate level language courses, were paired up. As one of them was teaching an advanced Spanish composition course and the other a lower-intermediate Spanish course, they designed and implemented a peer revision activity where the novice students would write essays and the more expert students would assume the role of reviewers. I wish to underscore the fact that this is a teacher project, conceptualized by language instructors (Zapata and Jiménez) and which includes an integrated pedagogical intervention and research component. Hence, this is an example of ‘action research’, the theoretically informed development, implementation, and analysis of an educational innovation conceptualized and carried out by teachers themselves. Additionally, as a model of innovative pedagogy, this project is modest in scope, an attribute that may be attractive (and necessary) for teachers who have limited time and material resources.

Introduction to the study-intervention

I will describe this project as it was conceptualized and carried out by Zapata and Jiménez and then will use activity theory to address its outcomes and to suggest possible improvements to the intervention itself with an eye toward future practice. Zapata and Jiménez designed a peer review process to encourage collaboration between advanced and lower-intermediate students. Working within a Vygotskian framework, their particular focus (and hope) was to create conditions that would enable a zone of proximal development to emerge through the peer review process. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined by Vygotsky as “the distance between 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 peers.” (1978:86; for a sophisticated discussion of the ZPD in second language education, see Kinginger, 2002, and Dunn & Lantolf, 1998). For Vygotsky, the ZPD is not only a model of the developmental process, but also a conceptual tool that educators can use to understand aspects of students’ emerging capacities that are in early stages of maturation. In this way, when used proactively, teachers using the ZPD concept as a diagnostic have the potential to create conditions that may give rise to specific forms of development. From their standpoint as teacher-researchers, Zapata and Jiménez asked the following questions of the peer revision activity: 1) What kinds of feedback do reviewers provide novice writers? 2) Can e-mail peer revisions activate novice writers’ and more experienced reviewers’ ZPDs as foreign language writers?

Here is a brief description of the peer review activity. Sixteen students from each of the two classes participated in the project. The sixteen lower-intermediate students wrote essays in Spanish which were then read and commented on by the advanced students. The task called for the lower-intermediate students to assume to the identity of a magazine editor whose column gives advice to teens about their problems. In this case, the editor (i.e., the lower-intermediate students) addresses letters related to dress code and conflicts teens have with their parents over this issue. In writing the composition, students were asked to focus on the use of the subjunctive mood and direct and indirect pronouns. The advanced students reviewing the essays were asked to focus on these features but also to provide comments on content and other grammatical forms as appropriate.

The novice students wrote the essays during a 50-minute period and subsequently the essays were distributed to the reviewers in hard copy format. The lines of the essays were numbered for ease of reference. The advanced students were asked to review the essays and to send their comments directly to the essay writers via email. The use of email to communicate revisions solved a substantial problem as the classes met at different times and negotiating face-to-face meetings would have been logistically difficult. The reviewers were encouraged to use English in their responses. Though the use of the L1 in foreign language education is controversial, some research has suggested that L1 use allows for collaboration and interaction that may otherwise not occur or would occur at a more remedial level, and thus circumscribed L1 use may contribute to L2 development, particularly when the L1 is used as a form of metatalk about the L2 (e.g., Ánton & DiCamilla, 1998; Swain & Lapkin, 2000; see also Lantolf, 2000, for a comprehensive review of research on L1 mediation in foreign language contexts).

When the reviewers had completed their task, they sent their comments to the essay writers and were asked to respond to questions focusing on their experience (e.g., Describe your experience revising the Spanish 002 students’ compositions? Do you think this activity helped you to think about the grammar of your own compositions? Would you willingly participate in such an activity again?). The lower-intermediate students were asked to re-write their essays taking account of the reviewers’ comments. Like the advanced students, they were also asked to answer a number of questions about the activity (e.g., Did you understand all the reviewers comments? Did you include all the suggested changes? If you did not adopt some suggestions, why? Was this a useful activity? Would you want to do it again?). Zapata and Jiménez’s rationale for the reflection survey was two fold, to provide them with a participant relative understanding of the intervention from the writers’ and reviewers’ perspectives, and to promote reflection on the part of participants that could help to focus their attention to the interpersonal experience that this intervention provoked.

Outcome

Due to space constraints, I will provide a synoptic overview of the outcome of this project. For the lower-intermediate students, from a total of 194 suggestions made by reviewers, 185 were incorporated into the rewrites. The percentage of incorporated suggestions, then, is very high as experienced second language teachers will recognize. Qualitatively reflecting on the experience of writing and receiving feedback on their essays, the lower-intermediate students had these responses to the revision process. I have selected only a few excerpts that reflect the general themes of their comments:

A number of positive features are apparent in these excerpts (student comments in total were very positive). The use of the L1 (English) successfully mitigated potential comprehension problems, as predicted by Zapata and Jiménez (this is indirectly referenced in excerpt 1). Excerpts 2-4 illustrate the encouraging effect of feedback from what Murphey and Murakami call “near peer role models” (1998). Murphey and Murakami designed a variety of tasks that paired together students of varying levels of communicative competence (in their study, Japanese students of ESL). Based on the analysis of pedagogical interventions supporting exchanges with “near peers” , Murphey and Murakami suggest that interaction with modestly advanced students can be a motivating experience for students at lesser stages of development. That is to say, for relatively novice language learners, feedback from students only a year or two in advance of their present writing ability may, in addition to the explicit focus of providing corrections on linguistic structure, provide a proximal proficiency goal that interaction with native or near native instructors may not. In essence, the reviewers may represent, to the lower-intermediate students, an obtainable level of foreign language expertise.

Evidence that near-peer role modeling may be occurring in the email revision task is seen in excerpt 3 where a student specifically aligns herself with the advanced students through reference to their shared experience of working through the lower-intermediate course. Excerpt 4 again shows a lower-intermediate student asserting solidarity with the advanced students and at the same time indicates a stance of resistance toward the authority of the course instructor. What was the experience like for the advanced student reviewers? The following are representative excerpts from advanced student-reviewers as they were written in the post-activity survey:

A first thing to note about the reviewer comments is that they reflect heterogeneous experiences of “the same task” (see Coughlan & Duff, 1994, for a discussion problematizing the conception of “one task” when multiple participants are involved). This is to be expected as activity systems often include heterogeneous voices illustrating a differential experience even when the overall orientation, or object of the activity, is shared. Excerpts 5 and 6 suggest that for some reviewers, the activity of responding to ‘novice’ writers’ texts presented a constructive challenge to their own sense of competency. Excerpt 7 illustrates a renewed self-awareness about the difficulty of additional language learning and makes explicit reference to solidarity with the lower-intermediate students, mirroring the gist of excerpts 3 and 4 above. Excerpts 8 and 9 reflect what I expected to see when the plans for this project were first discussed—that advanced students would develop better editing and authoring skills through participation in the institutionally sanctioned role of instructor. Palincsar & Brown (1984) term a switching around of student power positions in the classroom “reciprocal teaching”, where students occupy the structural role of the teacher and in turn see the educational process in a new light. Sociocultural researcher James Wertsch links reciprocal teaching to a reorganization of ‘participant structures’ (Phillips, 1972, in Wertsch, 1998). Participant structures are the naturalized cultural norms that generate typical interactional patterns and the identities that they create and represent, examples of which include the commonly cited Initiation, Response, Evaluation (IRE) sequence that classroom discourse researchers have documented extensively across a wide range of educational contexts (for such research on language classes, see Allright, 1980; van Lier, 1988 and 1996; for non-language research, see Erickson, 1986; Mehan, 1982). The appropriation and appreciation for students of what might be called ‘teacherly practices’ marks a distinct alteration in the usual division of labor of educational setting. Being put in the position of expert may increase the sense of knowledge and authority for participants who typically inhabit the discursive and institutional confines of a ‘student’ subject position, the entailments of which are to receive and demonstrate knowledge but rarely to act as an authority or expert.

Addressing this point from another perspective, Firth and Wagner decry a “general preoccupation with the learner, at the expense of other potentially relevant social identities” (1997:288). Liddicoat builds on this theme and states that in a number of communicative contexts in language education and language its related research (he particularly addresses those used in SLA experimental research), the communicative activity “can be typified as institutional forms of talk in which the roles of the participants in the interaction are defined by, and constrained by, the task and the context” (1997:314). In evidence in the voices of these student participants, the practice of reciprocal teaching shifts the division of labor in an activity setting and affords opportunities for constructing a new perspective on the writing process and their progress as developing language experts.

Problems and Solutions to Problems

Overall, from both the perspective of participating students and Zapata and Jiménez as the analysts, the peer review intervention was largely a success. As evidenced in their responses to the reflection survey, students in both classes indicated that the activity was productive. From a cultural historical perspective, there is also ample indication that a zone of proximal development was constructed/open up that provided insight and relatively long term reflection into their collective and individual language development. A primary outcome of the peer review activity, perhaps not necessarily a problem, is that though the reviewers’ instructions encouraged both content and grammatical revisions, of the 185 revisions suggested by the advanced students, 160 were grammatical in nature. The grammatical suggestions focused on subject-verb agreement (21 revisions), pronouns (17 revisions), articles and verb forms (13 revisions of each), spelling and subjunctive mood (12 revisions of each), verb tense (10 revisions), and so on down to word order (only 1 revision). Of the 25 content revisions, 11 addressed rephrasing, 7 vocabulary use, and 4 revisions each concerned the deletion or addition of information. Based on a few of the reviewers’ post-activity comments, some of the Spanish essays were difficult for them to understand. Decreased comprehension may have contributed to the overwhelming focus on syntactic and morphological revisions, as these features can be addressed somewhat independently of semantics. Excerpts from the reviewers’ reflection survey corroborate the comprehension problems:

With two clear problems outlined, an over emphasis on linguistic form at the expense of content and comprehension difficulties for the advanced student reviewers, we will consider what an activity theoretical analysis of this situation might suggest in terms of altering the rules, division of labor, and mediating artifacts of the system to potentially improve outcomes.

Figure 3: The current peer review system and future innovations

There is evidence that the object of the peer review activity as it was initially conceived, to facilitate cross-ability interaction that would be developmentally productive for students in both classes, was largely successful. The indications for some of the predicted outcomes are robust, notably a sense of progress as language learners and insight into their own near-past as novices for the advanced group, and grammatical assistance for the lower intermediates. Both groups noted a new-found solidarity with one another. As only one class period was used in each of the two Spanish classes, this is quite a reasonable outcome for such a brief exercise. A number possible outcomes, however, would require a longer time commitment and certain changes in the rules, division of labor, and mediating artifacts of the activity system to see their complete fruition. In figure 3 I have noted in italics areas that are likely to improve with changes to the system. Alteration in the rules, division of labor, and mediating artifacts are additionally marked by asterisks (*). Outcomes that would be furthered through changes in the system are marked in italics, and new or more robustly documentable outcomes that were only hinted at in the initial peer revision activity are marked by an asterisks (*).

The innovations to this system are the following. The rules were initially to exchange only one draft and revision; this was expanded to incorporate regular and dialogic interaction so that reviewers could ask questions of writers when comprehension was difficult, and writers could request follow-up assistance from reviewers, perhaps in the process of writing multiple drafts of an essay; the division of labor has also been augmented to include negotiation and the commitment to an extended set of interactions. As the majority or all of the predicted interactions would take place via email, the promise of extended collaboration is especially important. In a number of studies examining internet mediated tasks, communication researchers have discovered that the expectation of longer term commitment directly correlates to the building of stronger relationships and higher levels of interpersonal engagement (e.g., Walther, 1996). Strengthened interpersonal relationships, in relation to the peer revision activity, are predicted to enhance the near-peer role model effect for the lower-intermediate students (e.g., Murphey & Murakami, 1998) and for the advanced students, their construction of language expert identities through practices of “reciprocal teaching” (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). At the top of the triangle, a last possible change is suggested—to consider the possibility of face-to-face encounters if the logistical arrangements could be arranged. This may not be necessary or even be desirable for all students, but some may wish to pursue this option should the near-peer and mentoring relationships continue to develop.

The goal of activity theory is to define and analyze a given activity system, to diagnose possible problems, and to provide a framework for implementing innovations. This modest example of an already well-conceived classroom activity, peer revision linking disparate levels of foreign language students, is now revisioned in such a way that its benefits can be more fully realized.

6 Discussion

Activity theory posits an ecology that unifies social practice and human consciousness. This is, social practice and cognition are interdependent aspects of activity. Taking such a point of view seriously has potentially tremendous effects when applied to pedagogical work. Within language education particularly, activity theoretical goals of instruction and the desired outcomes of classroom activity are forced beyond a focus on what students know and rather extend to who participants are becoming (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Taking activity theory seriously also presents challenges to assessment and would encourage taking what emerges during joint activity as the ‘product’ or evidence of development (Swain, 2000). For language education professionals, this creates a more complex scenario of classroom goals and expectations which now can be seen to include issues such as social identity (Norton, 1997, 2000) the discursive construction self (Kramsch, 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000), and the distributed nature of what has been historically mis-recognized as individual cognitive activity (Salomon, 1993). Using their own experience of the email mediated production of a co-authored academic article that I have made frequent reference to in this chapter, Cole and Engeström note that “it may be in no small measure owing to such new forms of joint-activity-at-a-distance that we have made the current rediscovery that thinking occurs as much among as within individuals.” (1993:43)

7 Doxa in the house: A final note on Perspective

There are many ways in which the doxa, the accepted, uncontested, and naturalized arena of habitual activity, of epistemology and disciplinary particularity, of pedagogical conviction even, are difficult to challenge and see beyond. In a recent book examining technologies as they are used in everyday human activity, Bonnie Nardi and Vicky O’Day address the elusiveness of perception. The example they discuss references research on “inattentional blindness” (Mack & Rock, 1998), a claim made by visual perception researchers which suggests that processing visual information is a conscious act that requires focused attention to the visual field. Routine and repeated activities are susceptible to inattentional blindness, and inattentional blindness may also occur when or if one is unready to pay attention to certain objects in the visual field (Nardi & O’Day, 1999:15). What is the typical division of labor in your classroom? How often are students placed in expert roles? What is the object of activity and is it the one you want it to be (or even think it is)? There are no correct answers to these questions, of course, but inattentional blindness is an occupational hazard in the field of education that can be combated, if not entirely defeated, through attention to the community, rules, division of labor, and mediational means that facilitate progress toward the object of activity. It is hoped that this discussion of activity theory and its subsequent application to a small-scale pedagogical intervention will itself become a mediational affordance to educators interested in the transformation of educational practice.

Notes

I wish to thank Antonio Jiménez and Gabriela Zapata for first, conceiving of and implementing the creative and valuable peer editing project, and second, for their generosity in allowing me to discuss their work and build upon the data that they gathered. I also wish to voice my appreciation to Jim Lantolf for his careful review of this manuscript.

8 References

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[1] Thanks to Jim Lantolf this instructive play on words.

[2] Activity theory distinguishes three hierarchical levels of human behavior. These are activity (contextualizing framework), action (goal directed behavior), and operation (automatized actions). These levels can also be understood as different perspectives on the same event (Wells, 1999). This tristratal distinction is not exploited in this paper but interested readers are encouraged to look at Wells, 1999, and Keptelinin, 1996, for extensive discussion of this topic.