MIND, CULTURE, AND ACnVHY, 5(2), 127-134 Copyright © 1998, Regents of the University of CaUfcsnia on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition A Functional Systems Approach to Concept Development Vera John-Steiner, Teresa M. Meehan, and Holbrook Mahn University of New Mexico In Vygotsky's description and analysis of everyday and scientific concepts, he used as an example the differing processes for acquiring afirstand second language. In this article, we also draw an analogy between the processes of acquiring afirstand second language and acquiring everyday and scientific concepts. Our analysis, however, is grounded in a functional systems approach that allows us to conceptualize everyday and scientific concepts as an interconnected d3Tiatnic system rather than as separate processes implied by dichotomous relationships. There is a powerful commitment among sociocultural researchers to overcome conceptual dichotomies. Approaches that highlight the oppositions between mind and body, nature and nurture, and spoken and written language while ignoring their interconnections have been consistently challenged by scholars working within the Vygotskian legacy (Falmagne, 1995). Although the criticisms have been powerful, they have not always been accompanied by the use of alternative frameworks to represent the interconnectedness of phenomena. In this article, the notion of functional systems provides a framework to investigate and analyze the interconnections of scientific and everyday concepts as they are applied to the domains of first- and second-language acquisition. We also draw on advances in complexity theory and neurophysiology to amplify functional systems analysis. FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS In functional systems, dynamic internal and external processes are coordinated and integrated. Functional systems provide an important alternative to dichotomous ways of representing diversity in human cognitive processes and allow us to explore beyond linear representations of learning and development. In their cross-cultural research. Cole and Scribner (1974) relied on functional systems that "in the course of historically determined practical and theoretical activities ... change with the nature Requests for reprints should be sent to Vera John-Steiner, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 97531. E-mail: vygotsky@unm.edu 'Although the teimfimctional systems was first introduced by Anokhin (1935) and was later developed by Luria (1973), the methodological approach underlying it was developed by Vygotsky. The English translations of Vygotsky's writing on concept formation rely on a variety of terms. In the original translation of Thought and Language, spontaneous was used instead of the more recent translation of everyday concepts. According to Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), Vygotsky "preferred to call them 'everyday' concepts, thus avoiding the idea that they had been spontaneously invented by the child" (p. 270). 128 JOHN-STEINER, MEEHAN, MAHN of these activities" (p. 31). By examining the systematicity of concept formation, a functional systems approach analyzes the linkage of scientific and everyday concepts as a function of different contexts and tasks and includes artifacts, context, and cultural practices as part of the system. This approach accounts for the varying conditions under which humans acquire systematic concepts and the ways they relate them to both their everyday experiences and the sociocultural practices of their communities. Cole and Scribner's work and our own research with Native American children (John-Steiner, 1984) illustrated the importance of identifying children's use of various artifacts and learning style modalities in their developing concepts about their worlds and themselves. In reconciling the contradictory practices of schooling with those of their own communities, Pueblo children used functional learning systems to dynamically integrate visual, verbal, and kinesthetic mechanisms to accomplish different tasks. To meet the demands in shifting cultural contexts, the children relied on drawings, dramatic play, and storytelling (John-Steiner, 1984). The complexity of the children's learning styles would have remained hidden if the research had not gone beyond the dichotomization of the verbal and visual modes of representation. Luria's (1973) use of a functional systems approach emerged from his work with brain-damaged patients and his theoretical concerns with the cerebral localization of functions. He argued that during the course of development, not only do "functional structures of the processes" change, but the organization of such processes in the cerebral cortex are modified to accommodate the change (p. 32). According to Luria, a functional system "differs not only in the complexity of its structure, but also in the mobility of its component parts" (p. 27). Luria's and others' work (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989) showed that functional system analysis provides a powerful tool to investigate problems such as the interrelations between scientific concepts and everyday concepts. As Vygotsky showed some time ago, during ontogeny it is not only the structure of higher mental processes which changes, but also their relationship with each other, or, in other words, the 'interfunctional organization'. Whereas in the first stages of development a complex mental activity rests on a more elementary basis and depends on a 'basal' function, in subsequent stages of development it not only requires a more complex structure, but also starts to be performed with the close participation of structurally higher forms of activity. (Luria, 1973, p. 32) Luria's notion of interfunctional organization builds on Vygotsky's description of the relation between scientific and everyday concepts, in which scientific concepts rise on the foundation of everyday concepts and, in the process, fundamentally change the everyday concepts by drawing them into systemic relations. Only within a system can the concept acquire conscious awareness and a voluntary nature. Conscious awareness and the presence of a system are synonyms when we are speaking of [scientific] concepts, just as spontaneity, lack of conscious awareness, and the absence of a system are three different words for designating the nature of the child's [everyday] concept. (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 191-192) Vygotsky described the interfunctional reorganization in concept formation as a process in which scientific concepts grow downward from the domain of conscious awareness and volition "into the domain of the concrete, into the domain of personal experience" (p. 220), whereas everyday concepts, which begin in the concrete and empirical, "move toward the higher characteristics of concepts, toward conscious awareness and volition. The link between these two lines FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT 129 of development reflects their true natures" (p. 220). Vygotsky emphasizes that the two lines of development do not coincide but are connected by extremely complex relationships, and that "the links between the two processes and the tremendous influence they have on one another are possible because their development takes such different paths" (p. 220). COMPLEXITY THEORY There is an interesting parallel between Luria's functional systems approach and recent developments in "complexity theory" centered at the Santa Fe Institute. There, a consortium of physicists, biologists, and economists are studying the emergence of systems and the ways in which they organize themselves into complex wholes starting from random nothingness (Farmer, Toffoli, & Wolfram, 1984). These authors spoke of complexity as a class of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. These are the systems that are both stable enough to store information, and yet evanescent enough to transmit it. These are the systems that can be organized to perform complex computations, to react to the world, to be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. (Langton, 1995, p. 293) Scientists who have written about this process (Cowan, Pines, & Meltzer, 1994; Farmer et al., 1984; Gell-Mann, 1994; Kauffman, 1995; Langton, 1995; Lewin, 1992, and Waldrop, 1992) stressed that evolutionary processes tend "toward increasing sophistication, complexity, and functionality" (Farmer et al., 1984, p. 296). Systems that emerge from these processes "remain continuously dynamic, and are embedded in environments that themselves are continuously dynamic" (Farmer et al., 1984, p. 356). They wrote of the meinifold ways in which processes are braided together as systems develop—of systems that are both stable enough to contain information and evanescent enough to be spontaneous, and adaptive, biological systems rather than systems characterized by the clockwork predictability of Newtonian physics. Researchers who address complex adaptive systems follow a conceptual strategy emphasizing the emergence of phenomena moving from the simple to the increasingly more complex. A sociocultural approach, however, allows for the simultaneous consideration of both a fully developed system and a system in the process of development. The interaction between more and less experienced learners highlights the interface between systems that are relatively stable and ones that are developing and adaptive. As a continuously dynamic system, language is sufficiently stable to ensure communicative effectiveness yet is constantly developing in historically, socially, and interpersonally changing contexts. A functional systems approach not only analyzes language at different levels of organization, including the neurophysiological, psychological, and sociocultural planes as emphasized by Luria, but it also shows how these planes are part of a unified process. Language is a domain in which Vygotsky's notion of the distinct paths of development of everyday and scientific concepts within a unified process has been applied. FIRST-LANGUAGE ACOUISITION Contemporary research on language as a functional system highlights the mutually informative nature of the psychological level of analysis emphasized by Vygotsky and the neurophysiological 130 JOHN-STEINER, MEEHAN, MAHN level of analysis relevant to Luria's work. Luria's emphasis on the plasticity of the human brain and the way in which it is rapidly reorganized is supported by contemporary findings, especially those focusing on the 1st year of life. Advances in neuroimaging techniques show that the formation and pruning of synapses in early development occurs at different times and in different parts of the brain depending on the emergence of various skills. "Synaptogenesis," for instance, "begins in the motor cortex at about 2 months. Around then, infants lose their 'startle' and 'rooting' refiexes and begin to master purposeful movements" (Begley, 1997, p. 30; see also Huttenlocher, 1994). But by the second half of the 1st year, "the prefrontal cortex, the seat of forethought and logic, forms synapses at such a rate that it consumes twice as much energy as an adult brain. That furious pace continues for the child's first decade of life" and coincides with what is often referred to as the critical period for language development (Begley, 1997, p. 30; see also Bell & Fox, 1994; Chugani, 1996; Chugani, Phelps, & Mazziotta, 1993). Kuhl's (1991) research on phoneme acquisition illustrated the neuroplasticity of young children's brains compared with the relatively stable auditory maps apparent in more mature speakers. Using noninvasive electrical measurements, Kuhl observed that in a given language, when two sounds are clearly distinct or are psychologically categorized as belonging to different phoneme classes, the neurons associated with the auditory mapping of those sounds are separated in the cortex by enough distance that they are easily distinguishable to a child. However, if the sounds are allophonic—that is, they vary in pronunciation as a result of the phonetic environment but belong to the same phoneme class psychologically—^the neurons associated with the auditory mapping of those sounds are so close that an infant will have trouble distinguishing the two. In English, for example, the sounds [r] and [1] contrast in their distribution, whereas in Japanese, the same two sounds are perceived as being nearly identical. Neurophysical evidence from research like Kuhl's provides a powerful alternative to models of language acquisition theories that put a large emphasis on the notion of "hard-wired" structures. For immature speakers (i.e., young children acquiring their first language), the development of language processes involves the construction of a functional language system—the slow and complex interweaving of external and internal, auditory and vocal, verbal and nonverbal, cultural and familial, and physiological and psychological systems. In an earlier article, John-Steiner and Tatter (1983) suggested the following analysis: From birth the social forms of child-caretaker interactions, the tools used by humans in society to manipulate the environment, the culturally institutionalized patterns of social relations, and language, operating together as a sociosemiotic system are used by the child in cooperation with adults to organize behavior, perception, memory and complex mental processes, (p. 83) Recent research on the first 18 months of life attests to the relation between a common focus of attention during mundane daily activities and the emergence of the lexicon (John-Steiner & Tatter, 1983; Zukow-Goldring, 1997). According to these authors, language emerges out of a heterogenous situation where the infant is inundated by visual, verbal, and gestural stimulation; with the help of caregivers, the infant learns to focus selectively on linguistically relevant phenomena. In this process, caregivers ascribe intentionality to the infant's sounds and gestures and, in so doing, initiate the development of communicative intent. In other words, they scaffold scripted experiences but not specific grammatical rules (Nelson, 1996). There is a mutual interdependence between the acquisition of linguistic features (e.g., vocabulary) and the emergence FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT 131 of grammatical knowledge (Bates & Goodman, in press). In environments where scaffolding is lacking, language delays often exist (DeTemple & Beals, 1991; Peters, 1994). The acquisition of a first language occurs in many culturally patterned contexts ofjoint activity. One of the ways in which Vygotsky conceptualized this process was in his description of everyday concepts. The connection between first-language acquisition and everyday concepts is of interest, as Vygotsky's use of everyday concepts has been interpreted in a variety of ways by sociocultural scholars. For Kozulin (1990), for instance, the term implied an individually constructed mode of discovery linked to its Piagetian core meaning. Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991) brought a different interpretation to this notion. They wrote, by spontaneous [everyday] concepts he [Vygotsky] meant concepts that are acquired by the child outside of the context of explicit instruction. In themselves these concepts are mostly taken from adults, but they have never been introduced to the child in a systematic fashion and no attempts have been made to connect them with other related concepts, (p. 270) Their interpretation is akin to our own and is further supported by evidence from first-language acquisition. It requires immersion in communicative experiences with adults and peers, and the learner develops fiuency without a highly conscious awareness of explicit grammatical rules. SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Vygotsky situates first- and second-language acquisition within relationships among mutually interdependent individuals. Just as the acquisition of a first language provided a conceptual model for everyday concepts for Vygotsky, the processes of learning a second language created a useful analogy for scientific concepts. The learning of a second language, he wrote, "is a process that is conscious and deliberate from the start" (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 195). Vygotsky distinguished first-language from second-language acquisition and everyday from scientific concepts; however, even though he drew the distinctions, he also argued that first- and second-language acquisition are aspects of a unified language process and that scientific and everyday concepts are aspects of a unified process of concept formation. Nonetheless, the profound differences between these processes must not divert us from the fact that they are both aspects of speech development. The processes involved in the development of written speech are a third variant of this unified process of language development; it repeats neither of the two processes of speech development mentioned up to this point. All three processes, the learning of the native language, the learning of foreign languages, and the development of written speech interact with each other in complex ways. This reflects their mutual membership in a single class of genetic processes and the intemal unity of these processes. (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 179) Functional systems analysis allows us to examine the unity of such processes. Before applying such an analysis, however, it is important to note the limitation that Vygotsky saw in the analogy between first- and second-language acquisition and between everyday and scientific concepts. Scientific concepts organize everyday concepts into a system, whereas in the acquisition of a second language, a system—the first language—already exists. In drawing the distinctions between acquiring a native language and a second language, Vygotsky pointed out that the learning of a second language is marked by conscious awareness 132 JOHN-STEINER, MEEHAN, MAHN and volition, which also makes the second-language learners more aware of their first language. Furthermore, the acquisition of a second language is facilitated by the learner's reliance on word meanings originating from everyday experiences encoded within his or her native language. More subde rules—for example, pragmatic rules—are included in language interaction, but they are harder to specify than the rules of syntax and morphology. In many contemporary second-language classrooms, teaching the rule-governed aspects of language is giving way to approaches based more on the first-language acquisition process. Thus, the distinction between acquiring a first language and learning a second is not quite as firm (Richard-Amato, 1996). Gee (1995) supported Vygotsky's claim that the acquisition of a second language, when systematically taught, scaffolds conscious awareness of the rules governing language. At the same time, he raised the issue of Vygotsky's concentration on overt forms of learning typical of some formal schooling. Gee suggested that instead of dichotomizing instruction/learning and acquisition/development, which leads to polarized debates concerning effective models of education, we should examine how they interact. Vygotsky (1987) found a foundation for this interaction in the unity between scientific and everyday concept formation and drew the conclusion that "instruction [teaching/ learning processes] and development are neither two entirely independent processes nor a single process. In our view, they are two processes with complex interrelationships" (p. 201). As Vygotsky pointed out, the distinction between everyday and scientific concepts is a useful one, but it is insufficient for an analysis of the full range of language skills acquired. A functional systems approach in which foreign- and native-language acquisition are conceived as aspects of a unified process helps to reveal the complexity of language acquisition processes. Many contemporary language educators recognize that the weaving together of different processes (in this case, two languages) shifts over time with new challenges and opportunities; the shifts affect both the mastery of each language and the way in which they are linked together. Some of these processes move in the same direction, and others refiect a more complex picture. In a chapter entitled "The Road to Competence in an Alien Land," John-Steiner (1985) suggested that in the early phases of acquiring a second language (and here we are not referring to childhood bilinguals), novice speakers lean heavily on their native language as the primary processor of comprehension. But as people progress in their acquisition, we see a dual process at work: the separation of the two languages at the phonological and syntactic levels (fewer and fewer interference errors from first language to second language) with a concomitant unification at the level of meaning. Experienced bilingual interpreters provide interesting examples of such unification. To avoid undue reliance on the source or the target language, they develop an interesting semantic shorthand. For instance. United Nations interpreters who are trained in consecutive interpretation develop "sign nests" that at times resemble Chinese characters (JohnSteiner, 1985). When John-Steiner (1985) first wrote 'The Road to Competence in an Alien Land," which was based on research with immigrants acquiring a new language, she phrased her theoretical conclusions in terms of two related processes: separation and unification. We now suggest that using a functional system analysis provides a more explanatory conceptual framework. Rather than just formulating two processes in opposing trajectories, a functional systems approach analyzes where and how those trajectories become unified or interrelated. In such dynamic systems, development is not unidirectional; it can encompass simultaneous processes of separation and unification, as exemplified by our analysis of second-language acquisition. FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT 133 INTERWEAVING PROCESSES Newman et al. (1989) relied on a functional systems approach to analyze the interface of individual and group functioning. They wrote of the varied ways in which children rely on psychological tools, including charts, writing, and language. Their analysis bears a resemblance to our discussion of second-language learning in which a prototype for meaning notation is developed as a psychological tool to be used, appropriated, and individually adapted by different members of the interpreter community. In related work focusing on sixth-grade classrooms, Panofsky, John-Steiner, and Blackwell (1990) examined the biological taxonomies taught in the science class. The children neither limited themselves to sorting the concepts solely according to everyday concepts nor systematically applied the school-taught taxonomy—^for example, vertebrates and invertebrates. When they reproduced exemplars from their textbook of different taxonomic categories—such as mammals, birds, and fish—they relied on script-like arrangements. For instance, some children grouped robin and butterfly together "because they both fly in the air," and some children put animals that live in water together (e.g., turtle, frog, bullhead, and salamander). They also made up categories that make up a food chain, such as cat and mouse. Many of the children's responses showed they were attempting to learn scientific concepts. Before they were able to fully internalize these, they came up with groupings that were neither spontaneous nor strictly scientific. Rather than focusing exclusively on the distinctions Vygotsky drew for the developmental processes of scientific concept formation on one hand and everyday concept formation on the other, this article has emphasized another aspect of his theory: a functional systems approach that looks at the ways that complex, distinct processes in cognition and language are interrelated. Such an approach allows us ways to analyze and describe how processes of knowledge coconstmction are multiply shaped. Children search for organizing principles that, although linked to their experiences both inside and outside of school, are also guided by instructional emphases on systematicity. To achieve the goal of systematicity, individual learners rely on different means of constructing conceptual stability, illustrating Luria's emphasis on the role of differing means within functional systems and John-Steiner's (1995) notion of cognitive pluralism. In examining developmental change at these different levels of analysis and then integrating them, Vygotsky's ideas have provided an important starting point. 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