Nikolai Nechaev, member of the Russian Academy of Education, head of the Department of language psychology and foreign language learning at the Faculty of psychology in MSU, talks about genetic roots of consciousness and speech based on the activity approach.
Nikolai Nechaev mentioned that psychology differentiates between activity and communication. The former is the case when a subject performs some kind of action on an object and the latter is the case when subjects interact with each other. That explains an existence of various forms of communication. The only solution to this kind of dichotomy is a collaborative activity which was also promoted by Vygotsky, Rubinstein and Leontiev.
Talking about the correlation between an activity and communication, their importance and an importance of collaborative work Nikolai Nechaev underlined that the process is multi-faceted and ambiguous.
