Re(2): some joint activity re contextless reading?

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca)
Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:32:29 -0500

xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu writes:
> At 11:12 PM 3/27/99 -0700, you wrote:
>> >While whorf felt that language shaped thought to the social
>> >perspectives, I think that language develops to express cultural views.
>> >It is not so much that thought is different in different languages but
>> >rather language results from different social- and personal- ways of
>> >thinking.
>> >Ken Goodman
>> >--
>>

I think we need to see this relationship: culural views and values -
linguistic forms - personal interpretations of experience: as both
reciprocal and historically spiral, in the same way that appropriation of
cultural practices and tools is in general.

To start, for example, at cultural views: As Ken suggests, language is
constantly being transformed to express/realize changes in cultural views.
But this can only happen by particular individuals in particular
situations producing utterances that are linguistically novel in the
relevant respect. Other people in the discourse hear/read the new form
and are directed to try to identify some (previously unrecognized) aspect
of the situation that they can construe in terms of the novel term.

Where the discourse includes language learners (which we all are, of
course), they will not be aware that the utterance introduces a novel term
to the language and so they will use their normal language-learning
strategies to discover the meaning of the term and to use it to construe
some aspect of their experience in the situation. It is in this latter
way - as children appropriate their first language - that they also
simultaneously adopt the cultural world view of their interlocutors. In
due course, as they use the same term on a future relevant occasion, their
utterance instantiates this personal construal of experience as part of
the accepted cultural view. Speech thus both transforms and transmits
cultural views and values over time.

Like Peter Smagorinsky, I see this dialectical relationship as central to
Vygotsky's ideas about the social origins of individual learning and
development. It is also central to Halliday's views, as the following
quotes from "Language as Social Semiotic" (1978) make clear:
>
>A social reality (or a 'culture') is itself an edifice of meanings - a
>semiotic construct. In this perspective, language is one of the semiotic
>systems that constitute a culture; one that is distinctive in that it
>also serves as an encoding system for many (though not all) of the others.
>also serves as an encoding system for many (though not all) of the others.
...
>
>
>At the most concrete level, this means that we take account of the
>elementary fact that people talk to each other. Language does not
>consist of sentences; it consists of text, or discourse - the exchange of
>meanings in interpersonal contexts of one kind or another. The contexts
>in which meanings are exchanged are not devoid of social value; a context
>of speech is itself a semiotic construct, having a form (deriving from
>the culture) that enables the participants to predict features of the
>prevailing register - and hence to understand one another as they go
>along.
>
>But they do more than understand each other, in the sense of exchanging
>information and goods-and-services through the dynamic interplay of
>speech roles. By their everyday acts of meaning, people act out the
>social structure, affirming their own statuses and roles, and
>establishing and transmitting the shared systems of value and of
>knowledge. (p.2)
...
>
>
>The child learns his mother tongue in behavioural settings where the
>norms of the culture are acted out and enunciated for him, settings of
>parental control, instruction, personal interaction and the like; and,
>reciprocally, he is 'socialized' into the value systems and behaviour
>patterns of the culture through the use of language at the same time as
>he is learning it. ( p.23)
...
>
>
>
>This dependence on social structure is not merely unavoidable, it is
>essential to the child's development; he can develop only as social man,
>and therefore his experience must be shaped in ways which make him a
>member of society and his particular section of it. (1978, p.26)

"However, the child is never simply a passive recipient of the ways of
speaking that he or she encounters, but is continually constructing from
them a personal meaning potential and a related perspective on experience.
At every stage in his or her development, therefore - in childhood and
beyond - each individual has unique contributions to make to the
interactions in which he or she participates and an opportunity thereby to
contribute to the modification of the social structure. For, as Halliday
emphasizes, it is by individual acts of meaning in the situations in which
those interactions occur, that the "social reality is created, maintained
in good order, and continuously shaped and modified" (1978, p.139). In
keeping with his chosen perspective, therefore, Halliday's explanation of
the possibility - indeed the inevitability - of change is
inter-organismic, based in the dynamics of interaction and his conception
of social man."

(Quotes from Wells, G. "The complementary contributions of Halliday and
Vygotsky to a 'language-based theory of learning'", Linguistics and
Education, 6: 41-90, 1994).

Gordon Wells
OISE/University of Toronto