I employ the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget in analysing the modes of experimental task performance in order to elaborate on the role that cultural content plays in the development and functioning of the notions of possibility and necessity. I challenge the notion of cognitive lag that has hitherto pervaded explanations of the development of subjects from non-industrialised, diverse socio-cultural settings. A Piagetian experimental task, comprising half circles of contrasting colours, is used in the investigation. One of these half circles, covered with tinfoil, is assumed to be either red or green in colour but not knowable in advance, and it is used as a basis for hypothesising about the possible colour values of circles that could be made from combining this half with the uncovered one. Eighty Venda-speaking learners, 20 learners from each of four grades (Grades 1, 3, 5, and 7), with ages ranging from an average 6.5 years in Grade 1 to 12.5 years in Grade 7, participated in the study. The results reveal that learners, although functioning at the operational level of thinking, employ both concrete-functional and formal-abstract and conceptual modes of thinking at the same time. Thus the concept of possibility is conceptualised as constituting both its concrete, functional form (involving a conception of the possible as the possible-real) and its formal, conceptual form (involving the conception of the possible as a hypothetical state of affairs, disembedded from its concrete context of problem manifestation and involving holding two or more cognitive categories constant during problem solving).

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Although the Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) policy framework -following immediately after the dawn of democratic dispensation in South Africa -was organised around principles of cross-disciplinary content knowledge termed 'learning areas', unfortunately this approach subsequently was found to be problematic and was deemed to be responsible for the persistence of poor schooling performance. It was argued, therefore, that teachers in South Africa were not ready for the advanced instructional methodologies the approach espoused. It was further Background: This article reported on the developmental consequences of music instruction in Foundation Phase level of South African school context, specifically in relation to learners' learning and acquisition of early reading abilities. Against the background of the recent upsurge in research interest on the subject of conceptual and skills transfer among primary school learners in South Africa, the article uses contemporary advances in theory to interrogate empirical research on the benefits of music instruction for successful acquisition of reading abilities. Aim:The study aimed to interrogate the question -and resuscitate debate about -how conceptual skills in one subject discipline could transfer to benefit the learning and development of related conceptual skills in a different but related subject discipline. Setting:The setting for the research was a boys-only public primary school located in a middle-class suburb of Cape Town, South Africa.Methods: Document analysis and observation of reading activities and the performance records of Foundation Phase learners was carried out by the first author, and the performance of a group that was part of the school's music instruction programme was compared with that of a group that was not part of that programme. Results:The results suggested that participation in school music instruction might benefit primary school learners' development of early reading abilities. Conclusion:This is especially so when instructional activities are purposefully structured to benefit cognate conceptual skills, with crucial implications for policy development and the organisation of subject matter content knowledge in primary schooling in contemporary South Africa.

The present study, located in the socio-cultural tradition of research in developmental psychology, uses experimental tasks, adapted from the groundbreaking Lurian study (Luria, 1979(Luria, , 1976 to investigate South African children's acquisition and development of thinking and concepts -involving classification and generalisation, and how these concepts are linked to the specific cultural context of their manifestation.The paper provides new ways of understanding possible causes of contemporary problems that children encounter during classroom learning by examining the developmental roots of the specific modes of thinking and concept development in their concrete learning and developmental settings and specific tradition of learning within their schooling.

The article examines rural South African primary school learners' performance on classification and generalisation tasks to demonstrate the connection between verbal forms of thinking and the sociocultural activities in which, and through which, verbal thinking develops. The study explored the relationship between learning and development and the specific linguistic practices and sociocultural activities in which learners' development takes place to demonstrate the functioning of heterogeneous thought processes employed by learners during problem solving activities. The results suggest that different ways of thinking and concept development are rooted in and shaped by the forms of sociocultural activities and discourse modes in which learners participate. The specific finding on the peculiar differentiation of abstract-categorical mode of reasoning: informed by TshiVenda discourse modes of thinking, emphasizing abstract but functional class relations, has important implications on how formal knowledge and classroom learning activities for these learners are to be organized.Today, the South African primary school is going through a crisis situation comprising, among other things, low performance of learners in standardized local and international reading and numeracy tests (see Fleisch, 2008). The problems are often ascribed to poor teacher performance and teaching methodologies as well as regularly changing curriculum policy statements (cf. Jansen, 1997).The 2004 Human Sciences Research Council's study suggests that only 17% of learners learning in the indigenous, mother-tongue languages had not attained the minimum level of reading performance; with further studies suggesting that these children had difficulties with phonological, decoding and comprehension abilities (see Fleisch, 2008). On the basis of a consideration of a series of studies suggesting a pattern of underachievement in basic reading and numeracy skills, Fleisch argues, that:It is these South African children who struggle to read for meaning and to perform simple numerical operations -whose learning remains context-bound and non-generalisable (Fleisch, 2008, p. 30). The problem of learning and the potential for generalizability of abilities acquired through specific learning processes, has long characterized research in developmental psychology and education. This problem was framed in terms of the relationship between learning and development on the one hand, and the specific contexts or social settings (as well as the traditions of practice such as formal schooling) in which, and through which, learning and development take place on the other hand.This specific relationship between the learning that happens during formal schooling and the process of development were the theoretical foci of Vygotsky's analysis:In order to elaborate the dimensions of school learning, we will describe a new and exceptionally important concept without which the issue cannot be resolved: the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 85). Vygotsky's project wa...