Re: more on genres (CHAT and SFL)

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca)
Sun, 25 Aug 1996 18:51:27 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 15 Aug 1996, David Russell wrote:

> Jim, Gordon, Judy, and y'all, ....
> Gordon's reading of Leont'ev,for example, separates certain "semiotic"
> behaviors and material objects from others and and sees the semiotic as
> playing *now [not] a dominant role, now a supporting one. This is rather more
> cartesian than my reading of Leont'ev, who as I read him takes great pains
> to overcome analytical separations between, words and deeds. What is the
> advantage to you, Gordon, as an analyst of learning and teaching in
> schools, in making this distinction? What, Jim, is the goal for the analyst
> of finding a theoretical way of making linguistics subsume activity?

[* I have corrected what I hope was a typo in the above]

David,

Sorry to be so long in replying. I am taking a long time to catch up
with the backlog of messages that accumulated while I was on holiday.

I agree with your general account of semiosis and activity and, in
particular, with your point that any object or behaviour can function as
tool in activity, and therefore in meaning making. (I take this to be one
way of interpreting Ilyenkov's concept of the ideal.) So, you ask, why
draw a distinction between linguistic text-making and other modes of
semiotic action?

My answer is twofold: First, symbolic semiotic systems, and
particularly language, differ from other material tools in that, as
'signs', their principal function is both to mediate interaction among
coparticipants in an activity, and provide a means of representing that
activity and all the participants, tools, practices, and their features.
That is to say, one of the ways in which language functions as a toolkit
in activity is by enabling participants to discuss what they are doing
and to construe the relevant constituents and relationships either in
terms of the culture's 'folk' theory of the world that is encoded in
'everyday', informal conversation, or in terms of scientific theories
that are encoded in the technical registers and genres of particular
disciplines. Since symbolic discourse operations often cooccur with and
are interdependent with other, material-tool-based operations, it is
analytically useful to be able to distinguish them in order to describe
and study the ways in which they function interdependently in achieving
the goal of the action they mediate.

The second reason for making this distinction is to attempt to draw
attention to (and change) the way in which classroom activity is often
reduced to linguistic action, both by theorists/analysts and by
practitioners (and I include much of my own work here). When talk - and,
still more, written text - is the only form of action that is valued,
students' other modes of making meaning and transforming both their world
and their understanding are ignored or, still worse, suppressed.

It may be argued that I am distorting Leont'ev's theory - though I don't
think so. He also picks out language as a special type of tool. But, in
any case, I would argue that the purpose of a theory is to mediate both
understanding and situated social action, and that these two are
related. The theory is transformed in use and may also be used to
transform the situation as well as the practices of participants.

Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca
OISE/University of Toronto.