A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in understanding narratives by Korean children

Abstract

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.