The Blackbird Whistling or Just After? Vygotsky’s Tool and Sign as an Analytic for Writing

Abstract

Based on Vygotsky’s theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of development evidenced through the dialectical tension of tool and sign. Data were drawn from a series of reflective memos I authored during a seminar for new doctoral students designed to encourage the development of their identities as educational researchers. In an effort to understand how the tool and sign functions played out in this developmental context, I employed three methods of analysis: (a) I parsed them into evidential units of induction or deduction, (b) I positioned each unit on semantic differential scales to indicate the assumptions and authorial roles manifested, and (c) I examined how these positions were discursively realized through problematizing, intertextual reach, procedural membership, and reciprocal membership. The analysis demonstrates how examining the dialectical relationship of tool and sign illuminates the developmental trajectory of a student writer.

Keywords

semiotic mediation textual analysis evidentiality sociocultural theory literacy education

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bartholomae

(1985). Inventing the university. In Rose

(Ed.), When a writer can’t write: Studies in writer’s block and other composing-process problems (pp. 134-165). New York, NY: Guilford.

Barton

E. L.

(1993). Evidentials, argumentation, and epistemological stance. College English, 55(7), 745-769.

Bazerman

(1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bazerman

(2004). Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. In Prior

Bazerman

(Eds.), What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp. 83-96). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Berkenkotter

Huckin

T. N.

Ackerman

(1988). Conventions, conversations, and the writer: A case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. Research in the Teaching of English, 22(1), 9-44.

Britton

Burgess

Martin

McLeod

Rosen

(1975). The development of writing abilities. London, UK: Macmillan.

Chafe

(1986). Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In Chafe

Nichols

(Eds.), Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology (pp. 261-272). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Cole

(1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Feldman

(2003). Validity and quality in self-study. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 26-28.

10.

Hansson

(1973). Some types of research on response to literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 7(2), 260-284.

11.

Huckin

T. N.

(1992). Context-sensitive text analysis. In Kirsch

Sullivan

P. A.

(Eds.), Methods and methodology in composition research (pp. 84-104). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

12.

Luria

A. R.

(1994). The problem of the cultural behavior of the child. In Van Der Veer

Valsiner

(Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 57-72). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

13.

Miller

C. R.

(1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151-167.

14.

Nystrand

(1986). The structure of written communication: Studies in reciprocity between writers and readers. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

15.

Nystrand

Gamoran

(1991). Instructional discourse, student engagement, and literature achievement. Research in the Teaching of English, 25(3), 261-290.

16.

Osgood

C. E.

Suci

Tannenbaum

(1957). The measurement of meaning. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

17.

Russell

D. R.

(2010). Writing in multiple contexts: Vygotskian CHAT meets the phenomenology of genre. In Bazerman

Krut

Lunsford

McLeod

Null

Rogers

Stansell

(Eds.), Traditions of writing research (pp. 353-364). New York, NY: Routledge.

18.

Smagorinsky

(1997). Personal growth in social context: A high school senior’s search for meaning in and through writing. Written Communication, 14(1), 63-105.

19.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1987a). Lectures on psychology. In Reiber

Carton

(Eds.) and Minick

(Trans.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology (pp. 289-358). New York, NY: Plenum.

20.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1987b). Thinking and Speech. In Reiber

Carton

(Eds.) and Minick

(Trans.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology (pp. 39-285). New York, NY: Plenum.

21.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1994). The problem of the cultural development of the child. In Van Der Veer

Valsiner

(Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 57-72). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

22.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1997). The instrumental method. In Reiber

Carton

(Eds.) and Minick

(Trans.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 3: Problems of the theory and history of psychology (pp. 85-90). New York, NY: Plenum.

23.

Wertsch

J. V.

(1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

24.

Wertsch

J. V.

(2000). Vygotsky’s two minds on the nature of meaning. In Lee

C. D.

Smagorinsky

(Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry (pp. 19-30). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

25.

Witte

S. P.

(1992). Context, text, intertext: Toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. Written Communication, 9(2), 237-308.