Reading and concept formation By: Ingrid Silva

Reading and concept formation  An object, like a word, evokes something in our mind. But while what is evoked in our mind by an object is completely arbitrary and subjective.  Words have a meaning, at least in part, that is codified and valid for a limited number of people.

Vygotsky  He studied concept formation in man and its relation to the learning of words. In Vygotsky's opinion, the role played by words is fundamental: first we learn the relation between an object, a situation or a single action and a word. Up to this point we haven't learned a concept, just a relation between a circumscribed situation and a circumscribed sound/graphic sign.

 Vygotsky’s experiment:  subjects are presented with elements of different shapes, sizes and colors, the so- called "experimental blocks", behind which some meaningless strings of characters are traced. The task consists of establishing conceptual links between shapes, sizes, colors and "new words". The formation of the concept is followed by its transfer to other objects.

Vygotsky's conclusions  The subject is induced to use the new terms in talking about objects other than the experimental blocks, and to define their meaning in a generalized fashion.

Generalization  occurs by way of a sort of perception -> word - > perception -> word -> perception and so on through which new perceptions induce the formulation of new words to describe them, which induces the systematization of perception so that it will be possible, given a finite number of words, to express infinite perceptions, since two identical perceptions do not exist. Word becomes a means for the formation of concepts.

 As far as concept formation is concerned, a reiteration of the distinction made in the first part of the course about linguistic awareness is in order. To be able to elaborate a concept, it is necessary for an individual to be consciously aware of the knowledge she has gained. linguistic awareness linguistic awareness

Spontaneous and conscious concepts.  The difference between the learning of spontaneous concepts, like "apple" for example, and the learning of "scientific" concepts, like "exploitation", for example, lies in the fact that:

 “The development of the child's spontaneous concepts proceed upward, and the development of his scientific concepts downward [...]. The inception of a spontaneous concept can usually be traced to a face-to-face meeting with a concrete situation, while a scientific concept involves from the first a "mediated" attitude toward its object”.

According to Vygotsky  The influence of scientific concepts on the mental development of the child is analogous to the effect of learning a foreign language, a process which is conscious and deliberate from the start. In one's native language, the primitive aspects of speech are acquired before the more complex ones. The latter presuppose some awareness of phonetic, grammatical, and syntactic forms. With a foreign language, the higher forms develop before spontaneous, fluent speech

 In terms of reading, this means that an individual can face texts with concrete concepts until a given age, which is approximately placed in the preadolescent period. Then he acquires the awareness of this knowledge, and learns texts that even contain abstract meanings. As intellectual development goes on, abstraction capabilities become finer and finer. And meanings, both abstract and concrete, evolve.

Reading and concept evolution  Thoughts, words, and meanings are tightly interwoven, and it is probably more interesting to study them as a single system rather than try to isolate components and maniacally demark their limitations.

 The meanings of words are dynamic formations changing with the individual's development and with the various ways in which his thought functions. The relation between thought and word is not a thing but a process during which changes can be considered "as development in the functional sense”.

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