Volume: 15  Number: 1  Page: 38–52

Beneath Higher Ground: Vygotsky, Volosinov, and an Archaeology of Reported Speech in Primary EFL Writing

Jungran Yi and David Kellogg Seoul National University of Education, Department of English Education, South Korea

This study is a modest attempt to use three Korean primary school children and their English diaries as go-betweens to mediate in an apparent dispute between the founding fathers of socio-cultural theory about the nature of language and language awareness. According to Bruner, Vygotsky holds that mediation by others and self-mediation of written language by spoken language leads the child to cognitive ‘higher ground’ (Bruner, 1986: 148). But according to Nystrand, Bakhtin and Volosinov consider that any degree of removal from the concrete utterance spoken in context confers only abstraction and saps the utterance of meaning (Nystrand et al., 1997: 94). By studying the development of reported speech as direct and then indirect recorded speech in children’s writing, we see how a child’s utterances consciously acknowledge and incorporate utterances by others. The result is indeed higher cognitive ground, but this resulting cognitive complexity is only realised when it once more becomes a concrete utterance in context. The ‘higher ground’ to which the child moves, then, is not simply an elevated level of abstraction, but a heightened view of the audience.

Keywords: sociocultural theory, primary EFL, writing, reported speech

© 2006 J. Yi & D. Kellogg

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