The Concept of “Object” in Activity Theory and Its Application in Classroom Research: A Case Study of a Phonetics Course

Abstract

Activity Theory (AT) has its philosophical roots in classical German philosophy, in the works of Marx and Engels, and in the Soviet Russian cultural-historical school of psychology (Engeström, Activity theory and individual and social transformation, Cambridge University Press, 1999). AT and the Activity System (AS) model developed by Engeström are widely used in a variety of fields in social sciences. In this paper, I consider how the AS model and the concept of “object” in particular can be adopted when researching the complexity and dynamics of teaching activity and its outcome on a phonetics course at a university in China. The findings indicate that varied “object” that each individual student is working at during the teaching and learning activities constitutes an important and direct factor leading to differentiated learning outcome in the phonetics course. A thorough examination of the relationship between the components of the AS reveals ways of narrowing the gap between the collective “object” that is constructed publicly and explicitly during the lesson and the individual “object” constructed silently and implicitly by each individual. The author argues that the closer the collective “object” is to the individual ones, the more rewarding a lesson will be to the majority of the students. Thus it is the teachers' responsibility to identify various individual “objects” and to bridge the gap between the collective and individual “objects” in order to improve the quality of classroom teaching and learning.

活动理论（activity theory）是以人类活动尤其是社会文化实践活动为主要研究对象的一种跨学科的理论，目前较为广泛地运用于社会科学各领域。本研究将芬兰学者Engeström提出的活动系统模型，尤其是其中的“客体”概念，用于探究高等师范院校英语专业语音课堂教学，通过分析课堂活动客体的构建过程，反映语音课堂教学复杂性和教学目标的多元化，同时也展示了活动系统模型作为人类文化实践活动（例如：语言教学活动）的理论框架和分析工具的优越性及其广泛的适用范围。