No detailed description available for "Soviet Psycholinguistics".

This book is an introduction to Vygotsky and his theories of language and second language acquisition. Employing a dual framework of metatheory and metaphor, the author focuses on Vygotsky's cultural-historical perspective (contrasted with the sociocultural heritage more prevalent in the West) and its emphasis on history as change and thought as related to action. Included also is a comparison of Vygotskyan and Chomskyan theories of language and grammar.

Contains unabridged translations of articles from all major Soviet journals in the field.

During his ten-year period of systematic work in psychology, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky launched a series of investigations in developmental psychology, education, and psychopathology, many of which were interrupted by his untimely death. The Essential Vygotsky is a selection of the writings of Vygotsky (1896-1934), taken from the six volumes of Collected Works that have appeared both in Russian and in English translation. The editors have endeavored to choose the most important and most interesting contributions from all types of Vygotsky's writings, and thus from all six volumes, so as to reflect the overall purpose of the program that Vygotsky was developing at the time of his early death. The introductory essays for each section explore various aspects of Vygotsky's biography, in order to more clearly explain certain parts of his work and his writing. Vygotsky's work has been influential not only among developmental psychologists, but has become increasingly important to other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, and in the application of psychology in such areas as education, human-computer interface design, and the organization of work.

Contains essays that analyze learning and development based on Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of human development, describing how schooling is influenced by culture, and using Vygotsky's theory to find solutions to education problems.

William Frawley University of Delaware Several years ago, I performed a kind of perverse experiment. I showed, to several linguistic colleagues, the following comment made by Walker Percy (in The Message in the Bottle): language is too important a problem to be left only to linguists. The linguists' responses were peculiarly predictable: "What does Percy know? He's a mercenary outsider, a novelist, a psychiatrist! How can he say something like that?" Now, it should be known that the linguists who said such things in response were ardent followers of the linguistic vogue: to cross disciplines at whim for the sake of explanation---any explanation. It was odd, to say the least: Percy was damned by the very people who agreed with him! Fortunately, the papers in this book, though radically interdisciplinary, do not fall prey to the kind of hypocrisy described above. The papers (from the Third Delaware Symposium on Language Studies) address the question of literacy---a linguistic problem too important to be left only to linguists--but many of the authors are not linguists at all, and those who are linguists have taken the care to see beyond the parochialism of a single discipline. The subsequent papers have been written by psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, computer scientists, and language teachers to explain the problem of how humans develop, comprehend, and produce extended pieces of informa tion (discourses and texts).