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Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's idea that early years already had the wherewithal of adult concepts and affirmed the age-specific quality of child thinking instead. He demonstrated this through two ingenious 'name games'. In this paper, with the help of two Korean children, we will replicate the name games and use one game to study the difference between Vygotsky's 'Crisis at Three' and the 'Crisis at Seven'. We describe the differences from the systemic-functional perspective of Ruqaiya Hasan and Michael Halliday. In this way, we hope to restore a diagnostic function to Vygotsky's ZPD.

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the maturity of still-dependent functions in children. But this conception of the ZPD conflates two very different kinds of level: that of the child and that of the child's social milieu. We propose instead an analysis of child speech using Halliday's work on child development and his systemic-functional linguistics. We measure the emergence of modality, abstraction, and explicit clause Theme in Korean. We analyze four conversations with a single child over three years--from age four to seven. We find that there is a strong shift in the proportion of her clauses devoted to modal probability and towards explicit, textual themes. Counterintuitively, however, the nominal groups in her vocabulary become more concrete rather than more abstract. We conclude that Vygotsky's ZPD can be accurately gauged and traced through speech development, but for that very reason it cannot be reliably explained by either the child or the environment.

A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones of development (ZPD). Instead of interpreting the ZPD as learning (scaffolding, self-regulation or metacognition), we propose a strictly developmental view, based on Vygotsky's late and as yet untranslated pedological lectures. Because the lectures are unfinished, there are three apparent contradictions in his system of zones. Using the child language studies of the late Michael Halliday, we propose some possible solutions. In conclusion, we propose three alterations of the grandmotherly teachings that might orient the child towards the next, or proximal, zone of her development.

Laboratory pedagogy is moving away from step-by-step instructions and toward inquiry-based learning, but only now developing methods for integrating inquiry-based writing (IBW) practices into the laboratory course. Based on an earlier proposal (Science 2011;332:919), we designed and implemented an IBW sequence in a university bioinformatics course. We automatically generated unique, double-blinded, biologically plausible DNA sequences for each student. After guided instruction, students investigated sequences independently and responded through IBW writing assignments. IBW assignments were structured as condensed versions of a scientific research article, and because the sequences were double blinded, they were also assessed as authentic science and evaluated on clarity and persuasiveness. We piloted the approach in a seven-day workshop (35 students) at Perdana University in Malaysia. We observed dramatically improved student engagement and indirect evidence of improved learning outcomes over a similar workshop without IBW. Based on student feedback, initial discomfort with the writing component abated in favor of an overall positive response and increasing comfort with the high demands of student writing. Similarly, encouraging results were found in a semester length undergraduate module at the National University of Singapore (155 students).

Previous papers in these pages have dealt empirically with the child's first words, the child's first imitations, and the use of yes/no and wh-questions with infants. In this study, we touch on all these issues, but attempt to place them in a systemic-functional language framework and a cultural-historical learning one. First, we deal with some of Ruqaiya Hasan's acute criticisms of Vygotsky, using one of Vygotsky's untranslated last lectures to show that he was cognizant of some of these objections and moving to meet them. We then trace a child's responses to bilingual questions up to and including the moment when the child can answer. We find that the child doesn't learn by repeating words but instead by construing and re-enacting a whole interpersonal exchange. This appears to validate both the Halliday-Hasan critique of Vygotsky and Vygotsky's later approach.

We begin with the observation that some Korean elementary school children in English class, confined to a single situation and even a single language exponent in a role play, appear to produce far more coherent dialogue than the previous week when they were allowed completely free choices in language. We note that at the same time as their dialogue becomes longer, their sentences become shorter (tall and thinner on the printed page), and we suggest that the grammatical complexity is consciously unpacked as discourse complexity. When we turn to a large corpus of longitudinal and cross sectional data, we see, however, that "thinner" dialogue with short utterances is not always more creative, at least not grammatically. We see that the children are deliberately and consciously choosing more elliptical and less creative expressions when they speak. We generalize from this data to show that the problem is no mere artifact of the data sample. We theorize from this generalization to show that the development of the child's free will in syntax is related to a long chain of such constraints, leading from instincts to habits to intelligent choices oriented toward the immediate environment to acts of free will which are genuinely voluntary and which admit no sovereign but the child's developing self. Indeed, we shall argue that the exercise of this sovereignty is precisely how the child develops a self in the first place.

Vygotsky considered vraschivaniya, or 'ingrowing', an indispensable stage in the 'internalization' of meaning and described three different ways this could happen. But were these different ways options or substages? By logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's notebooks and published texts, and by recontextualizing them historically, I show that what started as three options became substages. By exemplifying some vraschivaniya with data from Korean school children, I show that what starts as dialogue shared only with the family through joint activity becomes, in the classroom, generalization that can be shared with a whole culture through narrative.

The work of L.S. Vygotsky was popularised in the West between two great waves of educational thought: constructivism and cognitivism. Reception was therefore colored by three metaphors introduced by Jerome Bruner: 'construction', 'scaffolding' and 'narrative'. Narratives were to be characterized by features we call SELF: Subjects, Expectancy and counter-expectancy, a Linear subject-verb-object clause grammar, and a Focalizing voice. In this paper, we try to understand how narratives might be learned in Korean, where subjects are optional and often dispreferred, processes tend to predominate in expectancy over participants, linearity is subject-object-verb rather than subject-verb-object, and even the focal voice must often be shared. For help, we return to Vygotsky's work in 'pedology', the holistic science of the child, and to similarly inspired work on child language by M.A.K. Halliday. First, we explore Vygotsky's own unit for the development of consciousness, "perezhivanie," an untranslatable term for the way in which the child 'over-lives' experience through language. Second, we show how Halliday's system networks can help us describe how "perezhivanie" might develop and we argue that Halliday's term 'construal' is a more useful, non-metaphorical, description of what Vygotsky had in mind.

This paper, conceptual but with empirical support, fills in some blanks in Vygotsky's reworking of Spinoza's Ethics. Here Vygotsky sought to develop a developmental theory of emotions that would fit his developmental theory of higher psychological functions; that is, one which used function to explain how structure changes (much as Darwin had already done) and used social and cultural history to explain how functions change (much as Halliday would later do). We propose three ways – roughly, the structural, the functional, and the developmental – to continue Vygotsky's unfinished 'The Teaching about Emotions', which we illustrate with instances from classroom data. Using the systemic-functional approach of Halliday, we show how language development provides an answer to the Cartesian dualism that has divided thinking from feeling, how objective logical and experiential meanings emerge from emotionally colored and interpersonal ones, and how the study of speech can bypass the 'theory of mind' problems that have long bedevilled child development studies. Each step draws support from a teaching log of first year elementary students in South Korea maintained by one of the authors, and each step suggests a different kind of classroom talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by revisiting an old dispute between the children's writer Chukovsky and the child psychologist Vygotsky on whether and how child literature should mediate development. It then considers child language language lessons in South Korea for clues about how such mediation might happen, and finds the development of rote language, the creation of concrete roles, and the formulation of abstract rules. The real aim of child literature in the classroom is not story sharing per se, but rather sharing-for-development, specifically development away from other-regulation and towards self-regulation, particularly emotional self-regulation, through role play and rule play. Chukovsky's work, rich in sonorous rhyming language suited to rote learning, is a good example of children's literature, but not a good example of child literature serving the emotional self-regulation of older children through the formation of roles and rules. Child literature is that which can be mastered by children as producers rather than passive consumers.

Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent writer/speakers. We find that the tendency to elaborate and embed clauses grows with expertise, while the tendency to tell stories wanes. We take this as evidence of the development of synoptic-dynamic complementarity in adolescents--and also in the theories of Halliday and Vygotsky.

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and argue that Vygotsky was aware of them and working to overcome them when he died. I then use the more holistic methods suggested by his late lectures, Hasan's criticisms, and Halliday and Matthiessen's work on systemic-functional semantics to show development of narrative in Korean school children. In accordance with Hasan's criticism, there was no obvious difference at the level of lexical word meanings. But there was a significant increase in embedding, in mental over material processes, and in "internal" over "external" cohesion, all of which suggest what Vygotsky calls the development of "inner 'perezhivanie'" at school age.

Teachers often assume that personal experience is a rich resource for classroom chat and a gold standard for meaningful exchange of information. But in this paper, we first present three kinds of reasons for suspecting that primary intersubjectivity--the "me and you" relationship in which personal experiences are directly exchanged between interlocutors--may be highly circumscribed in affordances for second or foreign language learners and, in contrast, secondary intersubjectivity--with more third-person reference and more imagined experiences--may offer higher levels of grammatical creativity. Firstly, and most theoretically, Vygotsky's work on the development of imagination suggests that one of the more important steps is freeing word meanings from recalled perceptual experience. Secondly, research from both teaching young learners a second language and from first language acquisition confirms that one way this happens is that interactions based on primary intersubjectivity give way to those based on secondary intersubjectivity, where children develop joint attention to some object or person external to the dyad. Thirdly, we present some data from Korean elementary school classrooms showing that children are markedly more "constructive"--that is, much freer from the influence of fixed expressions--when they are talking about textbook characters than when they are talking about themselves.

Researchers into moral education, and ethics educators too, often find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, we wish to know what the child will do beyond the narrow range of communicative functions carried out in a classroom, and to do this, we employ purely hypothetical problems, that is, problems that from the child's point of view are constructed merely of language. On the other hand, we find that when we construct hypothetical problems out of language, the child's response is likewise merely constructed of language. Our solution is to turn this problem into a postulate: we take "mere language" as the object of ethical study and construe grammar as a chain of choices, many with moral implications. Therefore, for example, issuing imperatives implies a different ethical stance from creating interrogatives, and both are different again from sharing information with declaratives; so too, presenting an experience as a doing involves being answerable for the deed in a way that is different from presenting it as a happening. We offer a modest demonstration of how this approach could be used in research in language and education.

Vygotsky's work on the acquisition of foreign language words has been criticized for lacking a formal view of language as a system and for taking little interest in questions such as the route and rate of language acquisition. We argue that word meanings really do not constitute a formal system, either in the way they develop, or in the way they are deployed. They may, of course, be taught that way, but we present evidence from a partial replication of Slimani (1992) that they are not, in fact, acquired that way. Instead, foreign language word meanings appear to be palimpsests of different layers of meaning: iconic, indexical, and, ultimately, symbolic and signifying. It seems likely that because of the role of volition in uptake, no fixed route or rate in vocabulary acquisition will ever be found. Sociocultural theory, however, offers a historical understanding of the roots and ranges of foreign language word meanings that is, we argue, more valuable in the end.