From speech with others to speech for self

1977

The Writing Instructor, 1989

Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso

Bakhtin’s deep insights on dialogicality resonates with views of language acquisition as a multimodal, situated, interactive process grounded in everyday experience and reverberating the voices of the care-givers. Drawing on a longitudinal videoethnography of French parent-child interactions in family life over a period of seven years, this study documents how the child’s language development is co-constructed through interactive tellings and retellings of activities and events permeated with multiple perspectives. Our choice of extracts will exemplify how the others’ voices shape children’s unique identity as speaker and co-speaker grounded in the richness of their daily life. Through the experience of assimilating the others’ words, utterances, and every single form of multimodal expression, children appropriate our common treasure, language, but also learn the individual power of accenting their productions with their own voice.

2019

Talking to oneself is not heard by anyone but us. So many terms have been used to indicate “inner speech”: inner voice, self-talk, verbal thoughts, etc. This psychic phenomenon refers to the silent production of words in one’s mind. Inner speech plays a central role in human consciousness, providing guidance for the growth of the individual. Sharing Vygotsky’s ideas, a central aspect of his theorizing is that inner speech is developmentally the internalisation of the external dialogues between children and their parents or other caregivers. This process follows four stages of internalization: external dialogue (level 1), private speech (level 2), expanded inner speech (level 3), condensed inner speech (level 4). Children’s private speech represents, indeed, a waystation on the developmental path between external and inner speech. Thus, the socio-cultural tool or symbol system of language, first used for interpersonal communication, is used by the child overtly not for communication ...

1998

In this monograph I examine how ten and eleven year-old children use language and literacy practices among themselves in school, inside and outside the classroom, to construct knowledge and identities. Combining ethnography with a Bakhtinian analysis of longitudinal recordings of children's dialogues, I focus in particular on their reproduction and framing of other people's voices, especially in conversational anecdotes. The book examines how older children use language together to explore the moral order of their social world, mediate their induction into institutional practices and explore their own identities.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2023

The recently published Springer Brief in cultural psychology presents theoretical and empirical advances on inner speech. The editor Pablo Fossa suggests viewing inner speech as a private area to remember, play and dream, rather than a mere psychological function connected to problem solving. Along the lines of this suggestion, I adopt a playful approach in order to review the volume. Rather than delivering results of an analysis, I invite us to use the academic journal platform to take part in a dialogical encounter. In the first part of this essay, I offer a transparent step-by-step process of researcher's positioning, based on remembering and playing. In the second part, I dream of research methodologies, which would allow us to explore inner speech as dynamic movements experienced by whole and dialogical beings. This experiment, in which I enact my inner speech on the academic stage, eventually lets three keymoments of Fossa's book come forward as gamechangers for future inquiries: 1. The importance of hearing one's voice in audio-diary based research, 2. the shift of attention towards experiential contexts of inner speech (such as bodily sensations or felt knowledge), and 3. the notion of thirdness as a meta-position, pointing at the mutual permeability of reflective and pre-reflective realms of inner speech. This performing review is inspired by a theatre-based practice called Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partners and represents an original contribution to researcher's self-reflexive positioning practices, as well as to inner speech qualitative research methodologies.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2000

In this article the author explores aspects of young children's private speech, examining characteristics of their development of discourse knowledge in utterances that are not directed to actual conversants. Two routes are taken, which the author tries to interlink without seeking a hard and fast juncture. The first is a study of what children are doing when they talk into a toy telephone, with reference to a transcript taken from empirical research. Knowledge of the essential structure of telephone discourse is displayed, as are emotional motivations behind the construction of pretence talk. The second is the notion of 'egocentric speech' as coined by Piaget and developed, within his sociocultural perspective to language acquisition, by Vygotsky. The author argues that dominant contemporary presentations of Vygotsky's notion of 'egocentric speech' tend to stress the self-regulatory or planning function at the expense of its role in expression of the imagination. The two discussions come together in the suggestion that the deployment of the imagination in reassembling sociocultural knowledge for the creation of pretence play, sometimes expressed in private speech, can be a significant factor in the exercise of discourse competencies for young children.

Human Development, 2004

In their commentaries, Avril Thorne and Rogers Hall are critical, helpful, and constructive-a rare find in the genre of academic discussions. I take up two issues that they touch upon: the problems that arise when working with transcripts and the notion of narrative. Talk, the Interpretation of Talk, and Working from Transcripts Both commentators hint at a different interpretation of the participants' actions/interactions. They ask whether it is possible to interpret the silence or nonengagement of some participants as a counter strategy or even resistance to what I termed 'slut bashing' and what I assumed to be the dominant activity of the group. At first, I was surprised by this interpretation because I had been working with transcripts from the videotaped interactions and could see how the participants were responding with their facial expressions and bodies, and how they were engaged with each other. However, there is a larger issue at stake. The transformation of bodily interactions into written texts is an issue of theoretical and methodological importance, and it was (conveniently) glossed in my contribution. Not only is it the ground against which Thorne and Hall (and other readers) can reach a noncomplicity interpretation of some of the participants' non-involvement in the slutbashing activity, but it also has repercussions that reach into the Schegloff-Wetherell-Engestrom debate that Hall very appropriately alluded to. Let me briefly explicate. When we engage in transcription, we yield to a view of discourse as language-the way we encounter it in the form of literate products and literary interpretations. According to this view, we hear 'words' and 'sentences' simply because writing has become our second nature, and it is in writing where words and syntactic units are marked off so we can see them. In fact, however, oral actions and interactions are limited to the immediate situation of the interlocutors; this 'narrowness of the dialogical situation' [see Freeman, in press] is transformed when we fix it in recordings and translate it into written text. What can be 'lost in translation' is the non-fixity, the fleetingness and negotiability of the interactive situation as a whole. And what comes into focus is a world of individual intentions as 'behind' the indi