ABSTRACT
The course Martha Demientieff had taken was primarily about one of the ways in which mind, according to Lev Vygotsky, is socially constituted: through the internalization and transformation of social interactions. The fundamental similarity is that both Dell Hymes and Mikhail Bakhtin developed their ideas in explicit opposition to the Saussurian contrast between langue and parole: language versus speech, autonomous versus contingent, social versus individual, structured system versus unstructured variation in individual expression. The final similarity between Hymes and Bakhtin is their conception of language acquisition. Briefly, according to Hymes, "in some sense difficult to specify, children learn and use, not grammar, but ways of speaking, styles that organize linguistic means, of which the formal grammar is a precipitate". In Vygotsky's own writings, features of particular semiotic systems are left as unanalyzed as features of the social setting and interactions within them. As with Hymes and Vygotsky earlier, Bakhtin's writings force us to confront important issues in teaching.
