ABSTRACT
Learning, it is argued throughout this book, takes place through social interaction which, in turn, occurs through the mediation of the ‘tools of tools’ – language (understood in this chapter as signs, symbols and their organisation) which in turn may be understood as both an exchange, and a mutual development, of concepts between participants. If that is so, then part of our journey to understanding how learning happens must be through understanding how talk shapes learning, which leads to questions about how talk might be understood within activities. Within the school context, language is mostly in the form of text or talk and I aim to offer two ways in which language-use in schools might be explored, according to the level of activity at which language is being used. My aim in this chapter is to point to two methods of analysing language for two levels of activity – operation and activity – and to offer an example of how language at the level of activity was analysed to reach an understanding of the complexity of the work of a teacher-mentor in a secondary school in the English Midlands. Vygotsky’s exploration of the relationship between thinking and speech was first made widely available in Thought and Language (1962) and in the papers collected in Mind in Society (1978). He believed that thinking and speech had different origins, but that at some point in time they had become intertwined. In order to become speech, thought underwent a series of transformations. Thought, argues Vygotsky, is not only expressed through words, but comes into existence through words (Vygotsky 1986: 218), so that thought is a verbal process. Thought ‘tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relation between things’ (ibid.) and, though coming into existence through words, undergoes many changes as it turns into speech (Vygotsky 1986: 218-219). The meaning of every word is a generalisation or a concept (1986: 212). Concepts emerge and take shape ‘in the course of a complex operation
aimed at the solution of some problem [and] for the process to begin a problem must arise that cannot be solved other than through the formation of new concepts’ (1986: 100). That is, concepts arise and evolve through activity. Words direct mental operations and the functional use of a word plays an important part in concept formation: real concepts are impossible without words (1986: 107). Although Vygotsky himself did not develop a means for further exploring the relationship between words and thought, several writers since have attempted to offer ways to understand the relationship between language and concept within a CHAT perspective (e.g. Daniels 2008; Engeström 1995; Hassan 1996; Wells 1999; Wertsch 1991). Leont’ev (1977: 9) argues that ‘meanings refract the world’; that they are ‘the linguistically transmuted and materialised ideal form of the existence of the objective world’ and ‘the generalization of reality that is crystallized and fixed in its sensuous vehicle, i.e. normally in a word or word combination’ (Leont’ev 1981: 226). If language is the material expression of meaning, and meanings are the expressions of ideal objective forms, an investigation of the language used in activity should reveal the meanings which those involved in ITE make within the activity. The problem becomes how to investigate the language in a systematic way. Roth and Lee (2007) summarise ways that writers interested in how language in activity might be understood have conceptualised the relationship between language and activity, and suggest that the issue is problematised by the range of understandings that have been developed. They further point to how the choice of approach might be influenced by the unit of activity under investigation; that is, whether the activity is being explored at the collective (activity) level or at the individual (operational) level. For Roth and Lee (2007), Conversation Analysis (CA) offers a useful tool for understanding language-use at an operational level. In their understanding, speech appears to be a routinised operation (Leont’ev 1978) in which ‘speech acts are constituted by components (operations) that conversationalists do not consciously choose: appropriate words emerge in response to the unfolding utterance by means of which the speaker attempts to achieve communicative goals’ (Roth 2005: 207). At the activity level, however, CA may not be able to tease out meanings from text or multiple interwoven conversations, and I have suggested (BoagMunroe 2004, 2007) that theories of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) might be a way to understand how language is used at this level.
