From Dialogue to Dialogism: the Confessions of a Writing Researcher

Abstract

What does dialogism have to offer to the study of writing as ‘practice’? In this chapter, I shall try to illustrate my navigation in relation to this complex issue from the empirical and epistemological point of view of the applied linguist. More specifically, I work as a writing researcher trying to understand what happens when children and teenagers appropriate a highly literate culture. How can an applied linguist come to view dialogism as a basic prerequisite for understanding and stimulating the development of cultural appropriation? And how does all of this relate to the underlying theme of this book — theory of culture — as applied to a different cultural practice like, for instance, jazz improvization?