Vygotsky measured his ‘zone of proximal development’ in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday’s categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent writer/speakers. We find that the tendency to elaborate and embed clauses grows with expertise, while the tendency to tell stories wanes. We take this (...) as evidence of the development of synoptic-dynamic complementarity in adolescents – and also in the theories of Halliday and Vygotsky. (shrink)

Vygotsky measured his ‘zone of proximal development’ in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday’s categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent writer/speakers. We find that the tendency to elaborate and embed clauses grows with expertise, while the tendency to tell stories wanes. We take this (...) as evidence of the development of synoptic-dynamic complementarity in adolescents – and also in the theories of Halliday and Vygotsky. (shrink)

In an article published in 1930, Lev Vygotsky refers explicitly to the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza. From a close reading of Vygotsky’s remarkable piece, ‘The socialist transformation of man,’ the extraordinary parallels in the lives and philosophies of Vygotsky and Spinoza are revealed. Then the strengths and weaknesses are assessed of the analytical approach Vygotsky may have inherited from Spinoza. It is suggested that there are analytical ramifications arising from Vygotsky’s possible reliance on Spinoza’s nuanced but essentially (...) dualistic philosophy. The conclusion is that the key limitation of this methodology is the elision of radical doubting with radical unknowability. (shrink)