Narrative and dialogue in child development: Vygotsky's pedology in systemic-functional perspective
The aims of this thesis by publication are twofold: to show how Vygotsky’s unfinished periodization of childhood might be used to answer some of Ruqaiya Hasan’s questions about Vygotsky’s work and to show how Halliday’s account of child language development might be used to complete some of the gaps in Vygotsky’s pedology.
Each chapter contains three kinds of material. The first, written specially for this thesis and unpublished, is a framing essay in which Hasan’s criticisms of Vygotsky are raised and justified. The second is a summary of Vygotsky’s pedological work, also written by myself but published in the Korean language during my PhD candidature: this is to be published in English in the coming two years. The third is a modest empirical verification I conducted as a PhD candidate: all of the studies except one (4.3) are now in print. I was the sole author for all of the summaries, the commentary piece (1.3), and two studies (4.3 and 5.3); I was principal author for the three co-authored studies (2.3, 3.3 and 6.3).
Vygotsky measured development in stages, and this thesis will follow his practice. For each developmental stage, the essay, the summary, and the study have a common goal: to find a unique social situation of development, an age-specific neoformation, and two forms of language use, narrative generalizations and dialogic communications, that link the context of situation to the neoformation. These two linguistic lines of development are hypothesized to give the complex, heterogeneous unity of each developmental stage its dynamic coherence.
Likewise, there are two theoretical lines of development that hold my thesis together: a systemic-functional theory of language and a cultural-historical theory of learning. With one, I hope to avoid the tautology of reducing the ZPD to “whatever the child is ready to learn next”. With the other, I hope to avoid a one-size-fits-all genre-based pedagogy and teaching-learning cycle.
