[Xmca-l] Re: That on That

Wed Feb 7 08:05:33 PST 2018

Like Andy, I'm not a psychologist; I suppose that is a way of saying that I
am not a parent. This has a lot of disadvantages, as psychologists and
parents keep reminding me, and I am acutely conscious of that even without
being reminded of it. And yet I think that the point of view of a childless
linguist is a perfectly valid one; if we are willing to consider the
validity of the views of teachers, and of children, let along adminstrators
and politicians, on language, we ought to be able to make room for a view
of child development which foregrounds language development too. It's not
the only view: I am perfectly willing to consider views of reading aloud
that are mainly concerned with enhancing the reader/readee relationship and
not with abolishing it. But it's a valid one, and it's mine.

I am actually not so sure that my view is completely counterposed to yours:
one of the ways of abolishing the reader-readee relationship might actually
be by enhancing it.  Historically, reading silently was a very late
development (it dates, like so much else, from the Renaissance, at least in
Europe and at least according to Clifford Geertz). If so, that means that
it probably happened not in the way we imagine now--that is, the
replacement of the reader with superior forms of contextualizing devices
such as animations--but with a revolutionary seizure of the semiotic means
by people with very different interests than those who had previously
monopolized it. My own view is that a lot of this happened in the
eighteenth century, which was when children's stories and novels were
invented, and female literacy played a key role.

Yesterday I read a study which showed that even in Scandinavian countries
where the government does provide preschool and even ante-natal care to
parents, the birth of a child immediately produces a thirty percent pay gap
between men and women: the birth of a child is a financial and economic
disaster from which the mother never recovers (and from which the father
never suffers at all!)  So, paradoxically, I think that the struggle for
silent reading (and it is a struggle), in addition to all of the important
ramifications of developing inner speech and developing verbal thinking
about which Vygotsky taught us, has a key social dimension as well: the
individuation of reading skills is not just for the emancipation of the
child. Naturally, in this struggle, a dependence on phonemes is more like a
spoon or a training wheel than like a revolutionary seizure of semiotic
means.

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full

On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:14 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:

> David,
>
> I think reading with children provides a lovely example of how the form of
> an intimate social interaction is shaped by the broader social context. It
> is now pretty much impossible for a teacher in a nursery or Reception class
> in England to read a story with a group of children for the sake of
> enjoying a cosy social interaction together. As soon as a book appears the
> focus has to be on teaching children to read (and this now tends to mean
> teaching children to sound out words with systemic phonics). Parents are
> also encouraged to see reading with their children as a kind of homework,
> aimed at accelerating their literacy development. Instead of enhancing the
> relationship between child and adult or modelling the pleasures of cosy
> social interactions, mediated by books, this can teach children that
> books=work=stress all round.
>
> As to the complicated nature of who addresses whom in a picture book
> designed to be read with a child, I think the best authors have understood
> that they need to make the experience enjoyable for the adult as well as
> for the child. Introducing some playful interaction between text and images
> or including associations which may be 'telling' for adult readers can help
> to draw the adult in but often the child's enjoyment will be enough reward
> to make the sharing a positive experience. Where the author is heavy handed
> with 'nudge nudge' references which are clearly intended to go over the
> child's head the book is, I think, less likely to stand the test of
> repeated readings and become a favourite.
>
> Like the spoon and chopsticks or the stabilisers and the bike, reading a
> book together can be seen as a crutch, scaffolding the child's learning to
> read independently but it can also be seen as an opportunity to share
> interests and meanings, a way of enriching the 'here and now' of the
> adult-child interaction with the 'there and then' of interesting stuff to
> talk about.
>
> If the adult is focused on teaching the child to read, on the book or even
> on the story, the 'sharing' may be both less enjoyable and less culturally
> informative than if the focus is on the child or on the interaction. Isn't
> this also the case for any face to face interaction? The more the focus is
> on WHAT is being said, the less participants are likely to learn about each
> other. In many forms of adult-adult interaction there are indeed explicit
> cues to show that knowing (and caring) about each other is NOT what the
> interaction is about.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 05 February 2018 23:03
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: That on That
>
> Rod:
>
> Yes, a great article! I will certainly recommend it to my friends in the
> progressive teachers' union; there is still this strong belief that somehow
> Scandinavia presents a social-democratic model for Korean education, and
> people don't realize how thoroughly and extensively the progressive
> education system there has been privatized, marketized, and consequently
> corrupted. To overthrow Marxist thinking Soviet education required a major
> social transformation, but in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland all it
> took was a handful of disgruntled voters to flip to coalition governments
> beholden to splinter right wing parties, and the educational system was
> very often an easily sacrificed pawn in the electoral game.
>
> Performativity is a problem with early years, because it results in real
> distortions in the process of mastering culture. I think, for historical
> reasons, our Russian friends tend to emphasize the instrumental aspects of
> mediated activity with toddlers. When I try to use the spoon example that
> impresses them so much with people in Korea and in China, it doesn't have
> the same effect at all, because spoons are essentially a crutch; a way of
> getting by until the child's hands are large enough to manipulate
> chopsticks. It's a little like an account of learning to ride a bicycle
> which makes the training wheels the goal of the activity: in the Galperin
> account, the tool is not so much a transitional "scaffold" to be dismantled
> as soon as possible as a permanent fixture.
>
> In Western literature--even in systemic functional accounts like the work
> of Geoff Williams--reading aloud is emphasized in work on children's
> literature, but what is emphasized is not the transition to silent reading
> but the enhancement of the relationship between the child and the adult. I
> think emphasizing the central role of the adult really does have a long
> term consequence, akiin to the idea of performativity in preschool
> evaluation, in the making and marketing of children's literature which is
> really aimed at holding the attention of the paying adult accompanying the
> child. This is part of the problem with "Finding Dory"--adults can't seem
> to get their heads around the fact that children find perfectly mundane
> activities enthralling so long as they can play an active role, and that is
> exactly what turning every children's story into a parable for adults
> prevents them from doing.
>
> And I think that one of the long term consequences is that the producers
> of the literature are a little like the Supremes--they have their message
> muddled, becuase they are addressing two very different interlocutors and
> creating two very different contexts of situation at one and the same time.
> Weirdly, I think the solution lies in the construction of the novel:
> novelists have had to figure out how to concatenate the way in which the
> characters address each other and the way in which the narrator addresses
> the reader, and the solution that Jane Austen and George Eliot worked out
> was to have a fairly "here and now" register between characters and a
> "there and then" one with the reader.
>
> This really has to be reversed when we read to children--it's much more
> like what we find in Virginia Woolf. If that example is too literary,
> though, you can simply compare the way that Diana Ross interacts with Flo
> Ballard when she says "Mama said..." with the way she interacts with us
> when she is supposedly pining away for lack of love but with a big smile on
> her face. In one case, the syntax is short and sweet, and the words map
> right onto the gesture, but in the other case things are really not so
> clear at all.
>
> David
>
> On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:24 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
> R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > David,
> >
> > At the risk of bouncing off your fascinating observations at something
> > of a tangent, I think your point, that rummaging around in the
> > infinite regress of context may not be helpful when we are trying to
> > understand what is going on in a conversation, underlines my point.
> > Those traces of an interaction which are exportable, while they may be
> > the most interesting and important if one is seeking to make
> > generalizable observations, may not be sufficient to explain what goes
> > on when minds meet. In 'Thinking and Speech', writing about the
> > relationship between 'spontaneous' and 'scientific' (or 'schooled'?)
> > concepts, Vygotsky observes that our spontaneous concepts, the fruits
> > of our experiential sense-making, give colour and vitality to our
> > understanding of the 'system' concepts which we learn to share with
> > others. Without the undercurrents of different speakers different
> > senses (smysl) the meanings which can be held in language would be no
> > more than a labelling system. I would argue that our day to day
> > interactions can take a huge variety of forms, understood in terms of
> > the extent to which we are interested in what lies beneath the common
> > form of people's words. Talk between teachers and students usually
> > does not require or encourage a meeting of minds (although it might be
> > a lot more effective if it did) and what is going on when singers
> > perform a song and listeners listen to it is a whole other kettle of
> > fish - how do you invite a listener to experience the feeling of
> > intimacy? It may be one thing to do this when performing to people
> > whose responses can be intimated but singing (and
> > dancing) out into the darkness of a huge arena or to a studio
> > camera/microphone must require a different kind of communication - so
> > no wonder the Supremes  (back in 1966 when the conventions for
> > broadcasting were still quite rough around the edges) look as if they
> > are not sure who they are looking at and singing to.
> >
> > This issue, of the nature of the relationship between
> > public/exportable and private/intimate aspects of interactions, keeps
> > reminding me of a paper in 'Early Years' by Annica Lofdahl and Hector
> > Prieto (
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575140903161438) which
> > explores the socio-political consequences of requiring Swedish
> > nurseries to publish 'Quality Accounts', to show the world what they
> > are doing. What this paper shows very clearly is how a focus on what
> > can be made public serves to shift the nature of interactions between
> > caregivers and between caregivers and children (we saw the same in the
> > UK when the introduction of the Early Years Foundation Stage resulted
> > in practitioners using the documentation as if it were a checklist of
> > behaviours which they had to capture, record and document in order to
> > provide evidence of children's progress). Some aspects of practice,
> > which felt important to caregivers 'on the floor', were not suitable
> > for inclusion in the Quality Accounts, either because they could not
> > easily be documented in ways which would be meaningful outside the
> > context ('you had to be there, man') or because they were too
> > confidential to be broadcast abroad. What is most significant,
> > however, is the authors observation that knowing they would have to
> > provide an account of what they did was enough to alter caregivers'
> > practices, leading them to prioritise more publishable kinds of
> > interactions. I can see that this might look, from outside, like a
> > positive transformation - helping to make caregivers more
> > 'accountable' but I can't help feeling that a very high price may have
> > been paid in terms of the shift from 'here-and-now' person focused
> > interactions to more professional, 'them out there' focused
> > behaviours. As Niels Bohr noted, you can have 'Klarheit' or you can have
> 'Richtigkeit' -clarity or 'rightness' - but not both - and clarity always
> seems more important to 'them out there'.
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > Rod
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> > mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> > Sent: 04 February 2018 21:23
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: That on That
> >
> > Rod:
> >
> > Halliday doesn't do CA--conversation analysis. He doesn't like the
> > fussy transcription method, which he says only interferes with the
> > ability to recreate the context of situation from the written record
> > of text. So for example CA assumes that pauses, hiccups, restarts and
> > so on are omnirelevant. Sometimes they are--I think that the jerkiness
> > of Trump's topic management is partly realized by his pauses, hiccups,
> and restarts.
> > But often they are not. So for example if a teacher is talking to a
> > class of children about the Wallace Line that separates Indonesian
> > flora and fauna from Australian, and a messenger arrives from the
> > principal with a note about an upcoming air-raid drill, we have to say
> > that the pause, hiccup, and restart is not contextually relevant (and
> > in fact Ruqaiya Hasan insists that these are two completely different
> contexts of situation).
> > It's pretty easy to show that for prelinguistic children and animals,
> > prosody is omnirelevant (stress and intonation) and articulation
> > (vowels and consonants) isn't--that's why Halliday doesn't approve of
> > using IPA to transcribe infants. But for some forms of advanced
> > literacy the relationship is the other way around: when you are
> > reading this post, for example, you are deducing my intonation and
> > stress from my vowels and consonants (and punctuation) and not the
> > other way around--that's why Halliday thinks that CA transcription
> > disrupts more than it adds to the analysis.
> >
> > And from this there occurs to me (because even when you are writing
> > you are experiencing your own words as hearer) another distinction
> > between Ruqaiya's "context of situation" and Vygotsky's social
> > situation of development. I think that the big contribution of CA to
> > linguistics was not the fussy transcription system, or the quaint
> > methodological assumption that everything we need to know in an
> > interaction is right "there" in an interaction and recoverable to all
> > of the members and therefore to the analyst. I think that their
> > biggest contribution was to teach us to learn to see conversation as
> > structural cooperation rather than functional competition. Turn-taking
> > is supra-grammatical collaboration, and not rhetorical survival of the
> > fittest. The problem is that the social situation of development
> > really is both. It is  Vygotsky tells us, a tension between the child
> > and the environment: a dialectical contradiction, even during stable
> > periods, and a pretty ferocious form of war during some of the
> > critical ones. I think that the whole relationship between growth and
> > learning is tense in exactly this way: embryos grow but do not learn,
> > and adults learn but do not grow, but the great dialectical
> > contradiction of those little people caught in between is that children
> have to do both at the same time.
> >
> > One way of understanding why and how Vygotsky had to come up with
> > concepts like "neoformation" and "social situation of development" is
> > to read the kind of pedology he wrote when he didn't have these
> > concepts yet. In "Pedology of the Adolescent", he argues that
> > childhood is not natural, but invented. Humans invented childhood the
> > way they invented language; women weaned children early in order to go
> > back to work or to have more children or both, and that created a long
> > period where children are consuming like an adult without being able
> > to produce like one. This, as Barbara Rogoff would say, led to
> > legitimate forms of peripheral participation; as Mariane Hedigaard
> > would say, it led to children as explorers.  At the other end of this
> > period, though, there is the opposite contradiction: because of
> > childhood, adolescents become ready to reproduce like adults long
> > before they are socio-culturally able to. And so...as the late, great
> Florence Ballard said...."can't hurry love!"
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWAE9nrRhPc
> >
> > (Notice how the Supremes--still adolescents themselves--are a bit
> > torn, when they dance, between physically interacting with each other,
> > with the hearer, and with themselves. It seems to me that this
> > reflects the indeterminate addresee of the lyrics....)
> >
> > David
> >
> >
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> > Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> > Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> >
> > Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> >
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 8:55 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
> > R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > David,
> > >
> > > On the question of 'experiencing our own words', I have been
> > > interested in the extent to which we are also able to experience
> > > other people through our experience of what they do to how we speak.
> > > The various adjustments which we make, in the timing and rhythm of
> > > our speaking, our intonation and accent and even our interpersonal
> > > timing and distance, are directly and physically experienced and
> > > therefore available (albeit largely
> > > unconsciously) to our memory of what interactions with this person
> > > feel like. I believe (and I am sure you will know much more about
> > > this) that linguists vary in terms of how much of this 'instancial',
> > > situation specific context can or should be acknowledged in analyses
> > > of
> > interactions.
> > > While much can be read from the traces of interaction which can be
> > > captured on paper, there is also much that is lost. Learning to read
> > > and write also seems to shift our attention so that what can be
> > > recorded becomes more significant, more thinkable and more important
> > > than the more person/situation specific, evanescent context which,
> > > however, may be particularly 'telling' when it comes to making
> > > sophisticated social judgements about what someone MEANT by what
> > > they
> > said.
> > >
> > > And of course, it may be that some people's social judgments are
> > > less sophisticated than others'.
> > >
> > > All the best,
> > >
> > > Rod
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> > > mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> > > Sent: 03 February 2018 00:40
> > > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > > Subject: [Xmca-l] That on That
> > >
> > >  When most of us speak, we try to "home in" on context--that is, we
> > > try to listen to what we are saying not only from the point of view
> > > of the speaker but also from the point of view of the hearer--who is
> > > part of the context of situation--and we therefore try to elaborate,
> > > to exend, and to enhance what we are saying from that point of view.
> > > Because speaking is a process of realizing or completing
> > > thinking--not simply expressing some thought that exists already in
> > > the mind--this process of transition from the speaker's point of
> > > view to that of the hearer can be traced in the lexicogrammar
> > > through what Halliday calls
> > the textual metafunction.
> > > There are two systems which govern the textual metafunction--which
> > > allow us to turn our own words into an experiencing of our own words.
> > > One is the system of Theme which is mostly realized in word order,
> > > and the other is the system of Information which is largely realized
> > > through
> > tonic stress).
> > > In word order, the speaker must manage a transition from Theme (the
> > > starting point of the speaker) to Rheme (the endpoint, where the
> > > speaker hands over to the hearer. In stress, the speaker must go
> > > from unstressed from Given (information that is shared with the
> > > hearer) to stressed New (information which is being shared). The
> > > variation between
> > "a" and "the"
> > > which Rod noted is just one example of this double transition: If I
> > > say "once upon a time there was a man (stressed); the man
> > > (unstressed) was a president", then "a man" is Rheme, and New
> > > iinformation in the first clause, but it is Theme and Given
> information in the second).
> > > Another example is the difference between "it" which can be used as
> > > Theme and as Given, and "that" which is used for Rheme and New: we
> > > can say "Look at THAT!" but we say "LOOK at it!"
> > > There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, though. That is,
> > > there are people who cannot seem to home in on context--who do not
> > > listen to themselves speak and do not manage to auto-adjust by
> > > taking in the hearer's point of view. As a consequence, they do not
> > > become more coherent as they speak, but less so.  Here's an example.
> > > "I think the me—I think it’s terrible. You wanna know the truth? I
> > > think it’s a disgrace. What’s going on in this country. I think it’s
> > > a
> > disgrace.
> > > The memo was sent to…Congress; it was declassified; Congress will do
> > > whatever…they’re going to do, but I think it’s a disgrace what’s
> > > happening in our country. And when you look at that and you see that
> > > and so many other things what’s (sic) going on….uh lotta people
> > > should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that. So I sent
> > > it over to Congress; they will do whatever they’re going to do;
> > > whatever they do is…fine; it was declassified and let’s see what
> > > happens. But a lot of people should be ashamed. Thank you very much."
> > > The speaker begins with the most common theme in English: "I". There
> > > is nothing particularly "egocentric" about this: it naturally
> > > follows on from the question  which the hearer just asked the
> > > speaker. But when the speaker arrives at the Rheme, which should be
> > > "memo", something happens. "It" is indicative--it should refer to
> > > the memo. So it appears that the speaker is saying that the memo is
> > > terrible. But that wasn't actually what the speaker meant. The
> > > speaker tries, heroically, to take the hearer point of view in the
> > > next clause, with an empty phrase "You wanna know the truth". But he
> > > then follows this up with a statement which, if we follow the chain
> > > of endoporic reference, actually says that the memo is a disgrace.
> > > In order to avoid this implicature, the speaker avoids "homing in"
> > > on context and instead makes it broader--what's going on in this
> > > country." But then back to the memo. You must say something about
> > > the memo, because that was what the question was about. So you say
> > > something that is actually entirely Given information--without any
> > > New at all. But the hearer is
> > expecting something New. One must say something new. So "That". "That
> > on That".
> > >
> > > David Kellogg
> > >
> > > Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> > > Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> > > Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> > >
> > > Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> > >
> > > http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
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