Although there is no lack of reasons for conversation analysis to be reluctant to adopt a cognitivist idiom and paradigm in studying talk and other conduct in interaction, examination of the literature with an open mind will disclose attentiveness to such themes in the conversation-analytic literature nonetheless. The pursuit of such themes however, cannot be appropriately and successfully conducted under the aegis of currently dominant cognitivist paradigms. One central analytic resource in CA work is the notion of a ‘possible X’, (...) a resource which is here described and exemplified for three discrete ‘values’ of ‘X’. The understanding of how such ‘possible Xs’ could work for participants in interaction invites understanding by analysts by reference to a ‘multiple passes’ model of uptake, a characterization which for now can be no more than metaphoric. Here is a venue at which conversation-analysts and neuro/cognitive analysts might usefully try to work together. (shrink)

An ontogenetically-informed epistemology is necessary to understandings of apprenticeship learning. The methodology required in this enterprise is a constructive phenomenology, a phenomenology that takes into account the fact that as infants, we were apprentices of our own bodies: we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves. The major focus of this essay is on infant social relationships that develop on the ground of our original corporeal-kinetic apprenticeship. It shows how joint attention, imitation, and turn-taking - all richly examined (...) areas in infant social development - are the foundation of apprenticeship learning in later adult life. The relationship between each infant capacity and later apprenticeship learning is demonstrated in examples from present-day research, specifically, research in the areas of medicine, sport, music, and tailoring, and research carried out by philosophers on apprenticeship learning. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. By Oliver Sacks.

This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s model of the “zone of proximal development”, (...) and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development. While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms. (shrink)