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K-Dragon: I told you it was unrealistic—first of all, they all talk at the same time. And secondly, Adina, Nemorino, and the sergeant all repeat themselves ALL the time.
LSV: That’s not realistic? I don’t know very much English, I’m afraid.
K-Dragon: No, not at all! Complete repetition in English conversation is almost impossible. When you repeat what I say, you always sound like you are questioning it?
LSV: Really? It sounds like I’m questioning it?
Koala: Or else it sounds like you are making fun of it!
LSV: Well, it’s not entirely realistic to study inner speech through egocentric speech either. They are related, but they are different functions. For example, some egocentric speech is really designed to be overheard. But the only way to really overhear inner speech is through facial expressions or gestures.
Handyman: When we Korean teachers ask questions, sometimes the children respond in 반말. You know, it’s not really polite to answer a teacher question in 반말. But it’s okay because it’s really egocentric speech. But it’s egocentric speech that is designed to be heard, and the teacher does answer it.
LSV: That’s interesting. How can you tell that it’s designed to be overheard?
Handyman: Oh, for one thing, it’s often a whole answer. So for example if you show a tree, and you ask “What’s this?” the child will say 소나무다! It has a verb particle attached, and it also says what kind of tree it is. So it’s obviously a whole answer, not the sort of thing you would say to yourself.
LSV: Do they do the same thing in English?
J-Monkey: Not at all. In English answers tend to the minimal. It’s actually very hard to get children to use elaborate language.
LSV: So the child’s English is also cut short. Just like inner speech. Or like the drunks that Dostoevsky is writing about; the ones that use a swear word to hold a whole conversation.
Ha-ha Smile: But the reasons for abridgement are different. In the case of inner speech, or drunken speech, or swearing, it’s cut short because we understand already. But in the case of English, it’s cut short because the child DOESN’T understand, because the child DOESN’T really know how to reply.
LSV: So understanding and the ability to reply are the same thing?
La Belle: Yes.
Superman: No.
Hongkong: I don’t know. What do you think?
LSV: Well, Bakhtin says that the ability to understand is nothing more and nothing less than the ability to give an appropriate reply.
Red Cherry: You agree with it?
LSV: I think it’s a good FUNCTIONAL definition of understanding. It doesn’t tell us exactly what understanding is structurally or how it comes out genetically. But I agree with it so long as we admit that an appropriate reply is sometimes just inner speech and not external speech. I agree that understanding is not passive.
Sunny: So the functions of “reception” and “production” are not really separate at all. They are integrated, in the same way that listening and speaking draw on the same vocabulary and the same grammar.
K-Dragon: Sure! We can see this in uptake, when people repeat what other people say. They are in the process of understanding, and that process integrates listening with speaking.
J-La Belle: In the last chapter, you said that foreign language begins with careful, deliberate, INTENTIONAL pronunciation. Foreign language learning begins with careful, deliberate INTENTIONAL composition of sentences.
LSV: Right, and foreign language learning begins with careful, deliberate INTENTIONAL definition of word meanings. Now, Polivanov points out that if we had to work ONLY with dictionary definitions, we would have to use a lot more words than we actually do. And that’s the situation in foreign language learning!
Ha-ha Smile: But learners use FEWER words, not more.
Mirror: And teachers use MORE words, not fewer. For example, I say things like “Look at this picture” instead of “Look”. And I often catch myself saying things like “Jinho asks Peter whether he would like some more or not”.
LSV: It sounds like written speech, doesn’t it?
Koala: Well, it’s monologic. Teacher talk is often monologic. Our Professor K is really bad that way. Even when he writes dialogues, they sound like monologues.
Chokey: I think there are two reasons for this IMBALANCE in the classroom, and neither one is really the child’s fault.
Mirror: In fact, my data shows that children DO talk in full sentences, if they are playing a game that gives them a good chance to talk in full sentences. They only cut short their talk when they are answering questions.
LSV: You say there are two reasons. What are they?
Chokey: First of all, they don’t know what to say. You said that people cut short what they are saying when they KNOW what the topic is. But suppose they DON’T know what the topic is and they don’t know how to ask? They ALSO cut short what they are saying.
LSV: Hmmm. I never thought of that. You are right, of course. What is the second reason?
Chokey: Well, you said that a lot of meaning can be put in INTONATION, not in vocabulary or grammar. If you listen to what the kids say, you’ll hear that it can be very rich in intonation! “Oh, wow!” “Noooo!” and “Aaaaaaaah!”
LSV: Do teachers use this?
Handyman: Not always. When you listen to teachers give long sentences, like “Jinho asks Peter whether he would like some more songpyeon or not” we can almost hear the teacher counting words:
“Jinho, asks, Peter, if, he, would, like, some, more, songpyeon, or, not!”
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9!
LSV: But maybe this helps the children hear the structure of the sentence? They can hear individual words which they might not hear if the sentence were spoken normally.
Mirror: IF they get a chance to use it! But you know, it seems to me that a lot of teacher talk is really WRITTEN speech!
LSV: Why do you say that?
K-Dragon: Well, first of all, it’s structurally written speech. Teachers use dictionary meanings, and they count out the words, and they deliberately construct fairly elaborate sentences.
LSV: OK. What about functionally?
K-Dragon: Functionally, oral speech should be DIALOGIC. But written speech is monologic, and so is a lot of teacher talk. The teacher talks and talks and talks. And the children do not reply, or only reply in very short predicates.
LSV: And genetically?
Mirror: Genetically, teacher talk is often WRITTEN OUT, in a teacher’s guide or a lesson plan or in some other material that the teacher uses to prepare. Professor K is like that, you know; his worst classes are when he is reading from the agenda!
Chokey: So that’s the problem! The teacher is standing at ONE pole, the pole of “written speech”. And the children are standing at the OTHER pole, a pole that looks, structurally, more like “inner speech”.
K-Dragon: Right. And our task, the task of structural integration, is to see if these two very different functions, written speech and inner speech, can meet in dialogue. THAT’S functional integration!
Superman: Is it possible?
K-Dragon: Of course it’s possible. The teacher’s written speech is at one pole. The child’s “inner speech” is at the other. But the two poles are connected by an infinite number of lines of longitude, and ultimately the teacher and the children are talking about the same thing.
LSV: It sounds like the “measure of generality”! But the “measure of generality” was really about word meaning. Word meanings go from object-related POINTING at the North Pole to abstraction related QUANTIFYING and SIGNIFYING at the South Pole. Now you are talking about speech in general.
K-Dragon: Well, it seems to me they are related. At one pole, the situation is completely known to the speakers and they can use indicative means, like pointing, facial expressions and intonation. At the other pole, the concrete facts of the situation are abstracted away. Right?
Ha-ha Smile: But in the case of the “measure of generality” we know that the two things are connected. We know, for example that one and a half real, eatable apples at the North Pole are related to the number “3/2” or “1.5” or “one and a half” at the South Pole. They both refer to the same idea, a number. Written speech and inner speech are really not the same thing at all.
K-Dragon: That’s true. But I think they are related nevertheless. Let’s imagine that you are preparing a lesson. You want think of something to say. Maybe you try it out a few different ways, in inner speech, before you really imagine yourself saying it. Then you write it down in a lesson plan.
J La Belle: Yes, it’s very much like the process of writing a paper for class! I go through stages of “rough draft”, “second draft” and “final draft”.
Hongkong: And then I get comments from Professor K, and the whole process starts over again!
Kitty: Not me! I never have time!
K-Dragon: Alright, let’s look at it the other way. Professor K arrives in class with his agenda. He gives his class. You think you understand what he says, but you are not sure. Then he says something that surprises you, and you have to change what you think. Finally, you walk away with some kind of new idea, some new thought. Isn’t this also like a “rough draft”, a “second draft” and a “final draft”?
LSV: It's also like a "volatilisation" of speech into thought--the process of speaking evaporated into a cloud of thinking.
Mirror: Yes, we sometimes even express our understanding with things like “Wow!” or “aha!”. Things that have intonation and stress, but no vocabulary or grammar—they are very much like inner speech!
Chokey: Hmmm….I think MY understanding sounds more like “ummmm” “hmmmm” or even “Oh, no!”
LSV: That’s “predicative” language. A predicate contains a MINIMUM of information. But it ALSO contains a judgment, an evaluation, a feeling of some kind. First of all, a feeling about what is important and what is not important. And secondly, some kind of expression of whether it’s good or bad.
Koala: Or just uncomprehensible!
Kitty: So the grammar of inner speech is cut short; it’s predicative. The word meanings are sensuous; it consists of personal meanings and not dictionary definitions. And the intonation is evaluative.
LSV: Right. Now, all of these structural aspects of inner speech really follow from the FUNCTION of inner speech. Remember that form follows function!
J-Monkey: Form follows function? What does that mean again?
K-Dragon: It means that structure changes AFTER function changes. At first the child’s egocentric speech is really just like the child’s communicative speech. There’s no difference. The child just exapts communicative speech and uses it to talk to himself.
Red Cherry: “Exapts”? What does that mean?
K-Dragon: It means that you use a spoon as a knife! It means you use a sock for a glove! It means you use a book as a pillow! You borrow something that was developed for ONE purpose and you USE it for a different one.
Sunny: What happens next?
LSV: If you keep using a book as a pillow, you will find that you choose softer and softer books, and you make them thicker and thicker. Form follows function!
Hongkong: But how does that work with inner speech?
LSV: When you talk to yourself, you find that you don’t have to say everything. You already know a lot of what you are talking about. You also find that the meanings are not really dictionary definitions; they are based on your own senses. And finally, you find that what you say is often about how good or bad things are, or what they mean to you. And so the structure of what you say to yourself changes.
Ha-ha Smile: And that’s how the child’s egocentric speech turns into inner speech?
LSV: Yes. You see, it was never really egocentric speech at all. It was always social speech. It was just social speech that you use on yourself, and that’s why it is so very dialogic.
Handyman: I thought you said it was a monologue!
LSV: Did I? Sorry! I disagree with myself sometimes!
Superman: I guess that just proves that inner speech is dialogic!
Kitty: You said that word meaning changes, from dictionary definitions to sense impressions. Do you mean sociogenetically, that is, historically, or microgenetically?
LSV: Both, of course. We saw that older word meanings are usually sensuous word meanings, and that dictionaries don’t really get written up until written speech becomes quite general, which in Europe didn’t happen until the eighteenth century. We also saw that in first language acquisition children go from everyday concepts, that is, sense-based meanings, to academic ones, that is, word meanings that have been defined in a system.
Sunny: But you said that in foreign language learning it’s the other way around!
LSV: Yes, and I also said that foreign language learning is really part of academic concept formation. So it’s part of the child’s general progression from sense-based meanings to academic, systematic ones.
J-Monkey: Does it work the other way sometimes? That is, can we ever go from academic, systematic ones to real, sense based meanings?
K-Dragon: Well, that’s what fluency is, don’t you think? That’s what we really MEAN by mastery of a foreign language.
LSV: Besides, when you read a novel, you usually begin with a defined situation. Then you meet a main character, say “Anna Karenina”. But you only really know what that character MEANS when you have finished the book. With books like “Anna Karenina” and “Don Quixote”, you only really know the SIGNIFICANCE of the title when you have absorbed all of the different SENSES of the whole book.
Red Cherry: So what exactly is the difference between SENSE and SIGNIFICANCE?
LSV: Well, think of an apple. It has a USE value; you can eat it. But it also has an EXCHANGE value; you can sell it, and get five hundred or a thousand won.
K-Dragon: Words are like this too: they have sensuous, personal, use values, which we call “sense”. But they also have generally accepted exchange values, which we call “signification”.
J La Belle: That’s the stuff we write in dictionaries, and it’s what we get on vocabulary tests. When we teach “Look and Listen”, about Jinho and Ann and Joon going swimming, it’s mostly sense.
Chokey: But when we teach “Let’s Review” and when we say “Listen to the dialogue between A and B and decide if they are going swimming or hiking or camping” then it is mostly signification.
Mirror: So when we pay attention to accuracy, it really means we are looking at the SIGNIFICATION of words. And when we pay attention to fluency, it really means we are more interested in SENSE?
K-Dragon: Yes, but be careful. The sense of a word doesn’t belong to the word. It belongs to the utterance. So for example the word “can” doesn’t mean anything unless we say “I can swim”.
Koala: It still doesn’t really mean anything. The sense of the utterance belongs to the situation. So for example “I can swim” means something very different in response to Mrs. Smith’s question about whether Joon can swim or not and Ann’s suggestion to Jinho that they go swimming this afternoon.
LSV: Right. Now, signification is pretty much the opposite. Sense is realized in the structure of situations. But signification is often realized in the very structure of words.
K-Dragon: That is why academic concepts have much more complex word structure than everyday concepts: a word like “refrigerator” or “helicopter” is morphologically more complex than a word like “apple” or “swim”.
Chokey: But we use “refrigerator” in an everyday sense, don’t we?
LSV: You know, the Delaware Indians have a very complex word that means, if we break it down morphologically, something like “go ahead and get in your canoes and cross the river so we can fight you!” But that’s not how they use it. They just use it the same way that Dostoevsky’s drunks swear: it just means “Nyah nyah nyah!” “Chickens!”
Hongkong: So, complex significations can often stand for simple senses.
K-Dragon: Sure! You can use twenty scudi to buy apples. But you can also use it to buy a computer. Or you could buy a bottle of magic elixir that will make everybody fall in love with you.
Mirror: Twenty scudi?
K-Dragon: Yes. They didn’t use dollars or won in Italy. They used scudi. You get twenty scudi when you join the army. And then you can use it to buy a bottle of Doctor Dulcamara’s magic elixir.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYblz0i4Dsc
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