Berger and Luckmann, "The Social Construction of Reality"
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Anchor Books, New York, 19671
Part Three, Section 1, “Secondary Socialization”, p. 163:
The reality accent of knowledge internalized in primary socialization is given quasi-automatically. In secondary socialization it must be reinforced by specific pedagogic techniques, ‘brought home’ to the individual. The phrase is suggestive. The original reality of childhood is ‘home’. It posits itself as such, inevitably and, as it were, ‘naturally’. By comparison with it, all later realities are ‘artificial’. Thus the school teacher tries to ‘bring home’ the contents he is imparting by making them vivid (that is, making them seem as alive as the ‘home world’ of the child), relevant (that is, linking them to the relevance structures already present in the ‘home world’) and interesting (that is, inducing the attentiveness of the child to detach itself from its ‘natural’ objects to these more ‘artificial’ ones). These manoeuvres are necessary because an internalized reality is already there, persistently ‘in the way’ of new internalizations. The degree and precise character of these pedagogic techniques will vary with the motivations the individual has for the acquisition of the new knowledge.
The more these techniques make subjectively plausible a continuity between the original and the new elements of knowledge, the more readily they acquire the accent of reality. One learns a second language by building on the taken-for-granted reality of one’s ‘mother tongue’. For a long time, one continually retranslates into the original language whatever elements of the new language one is acquiring. Only in this way can the new language begin to have any reality. As this reality comes to be established in its own right, it slowly becomes possible to forego retranslation. One becomes capable of ‘thinking in’ the new language. Nevertheless, it is rare that a language learned in later life attains the inevitable, self-evident reality of the first language learned in childhood. Hence derives, of course, the affective quality of the ‘mother tongue’. Mutatis mutandis, the same characteristics of building from the ‘home’ reality, linking up with it as learning proceeds and only slowly breaking this linkage, appertain to other learning sequences in secondary socialization.