Towards cultural-historical and dialogical writing research – some methodological considerations

Introduction

What can a suitable way of investigating writing from a dialogical and cultural-historical perspective look like? It is this question the present article wants to address — the functioning of writing as one type of speech activity being the object of psycholinguistic interest. But this question first leads to another one. What is meant by a dialogical and cultural-historical perspective? During the 1920s and 1930s several attempts are made in Soviet psychology, linguistics and language philosophy to conceptualize thinking and speech in a way that focuses on the social nature of language both in communication and in cognition. Four scholars are especially productive and creative in this attempt: the linguist Lev P.Jakubinsky (1892—1945), the founder of the cultural-historical approach in psychology Lev S. Vygotsky (1896—1934), and two of the scholars who formulated an explicitly dialogical approach in language philosophy, Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895—1975) and Valentin N. Voloshinov (1895— 1936)[†]. What they have in common is a deep interest in language, an image of language as a dialogic and social activity also when it is used in other contexts than primarily communicative ones, and the role they assign to language for human consciousness.

In this article, some important aspects of their dia­logical conceptualizations of thinking and speech are discussed in order to formulate methodological consequences for researching writing: the addressing and addressed tendencies in speech, even if it serves other functions than face-to-face communication, the creative-semiotic nature of speaking and writing as creating spheres of meaning for others, and the diversity of these others which lies beyond concrete communication partners. The relationship of writing with other forms of speech, especially with inner dialogue, and the close integration of individual writing processes and socio­cultural literate practices are identified as two major implications for writing. The question is raised whether current methodologies in writing research (e. g. literacy studies, analysis of thinking-aloud protocols or real­time computer-based experimentation) meet these affordances posed by a dialogical perspective on writing.

In consequence, an alternative extension to current methodologies for investigating writing is sketched, which is a variegation of auto-confrontation as method in workplace psychology [9; 10; 11; 12]. The relevant features of auto-confrontation in being a dialogically oriented method are discussed and their advantages for studying writing elaborated. Finally, the proposed research setting is critically evaluated against its theoretical basis and with regard to its implementation.

Dialogical and cultural-historical conceptualizations of thinking and speech — some central aspects

The most outstanding characteristics of a dialogical perspective on thinking and speech is its focus on dialogue and on sociality in language. Jakubinsky's 1923 paper «On Dialogic Speech»[‡] (O dialogiceskoj reci) expresses the focus on dialogue in a prominent way and, in that, influences the other scholars mentioned [cf. 5, p. 73][§]. In this article, Jakubinsky takes interest in the various forms or gestalts of linguistic activity. Language, according to Jakubinsky [24], only exists as differing forms of speech, which are interrelated on the one hand, but also specific on the other hand, in that they always correspond with the forms of social interaction they take place in and with the quality of the other's presence. The functional speech forms are classified along two lines: a dialogic-to-monologic one and a direct-to-indirect one. Like this, it is possible to conceptualize monologue and dialogue without sharp distinction but rather as gradual relation. Furthermore, Jakubinsky goes beyond a simple identifying of direct, face-to-face speech with dialogue (although this is the most prevalent and interesting form for him) and indirect, mediated (and mostly: written) speech with monologue. In so doing, the addressed and addressing character of writing can become visible. In this regard, Jakubinsky and the members of the Bakhtin circle share the «common opinion that even in monologue we find dialogic tendencies due to the fact that the speaker is constantly aware of the attitude and potential response of the perceiver» [25, p. 319].

The other does not always have to be a concrete person. In the absence of a real other that is present or can be imagined «an addressee is presupposed in the person (...) of a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs» [33, p. 85]. More so, there is always a third position involved, the «superaddressee (.), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time» [3, p. 126].

In Bakhtin's writings yet another aspect comes into play. He affirms that utterances are always dialogic, not only because they are more or less intentionally addressed and evoke responses, but moreover because every «utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances» [2, p. 69]. It is not only the real or imagined response of an addressee that leads to dialogicality, but the larger historicity of the utterance:

«However monological the utterance may be (for example, a scientific or philosophical treatise), however much it may concentrate on its own object, it cannot but be, in some measure, a response to what has already been said about the given topic, on the given issue, even though this responsiveness may not have assumed a clear-cut external expression. It will be manifested in the overtones of the style, in the finest nuances of the composition. The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones, and they must be taken into account in order to understand fully the style of the utterance. After all, our thought itself-philo- sophical, scientific, and artistic-is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others' thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well». [2, p. 92].

The previous citation shows clearly that dialogicali- ty, how ever far the notion applies to monologic or written speech genres and not just face-to-face dialogue, always stays tied to certain stylistic, formal properties and is not only a matter of a somehow language-free inner orientation towards others.

On the other hand, it becomes also clear that language is no «ready-made artefact» [33, p. 77] or an instrument[**] that determines the type of interaction with others according to its inherent formal properties. Language is shapeable and indeed must be shaped every time it is used, although this shaping is never at random but always responsive, dialogic. It is in the process of shaping that meaning is constituted, because meaning is neither something firmly attached to a verbal form[††] nor something that exists independently from language in the speaker's cognition. To the contrary, meaning emerges as an evaluative answer to the historicity of every utterance, in a positioning act.

Every utterance takes its role in shaping specific chronotopes, that is, spheres of meaning and of temporal and topological constructs the speakers orientate and position themselves in. This process is a semiotic one, in that meaning is re-presented, or better: created, through language. A distinction must be made between representing time, the space of the author and his addressees, and represented time, the world created by a person for another person in the process of speaking. However, both chronotopical levels are dialogically interrelated: «the author-creator, finding himself outside the chrono­topes of the world he represents in his work, is nevertheless not simply outside but as it were tangential to these chronotopes» [1, p. 256]. These creative-semiotic characteristics of language seen from a dialogical perspective are especially important in writing, when the other is not there, at least not in the same quality as he or she is in face-to-face dialogue[‡‡]. The writer, then, has to build up the situation for communication alone; he or she has to imagine and to anticipate the other and to orchestrate the adequate contextual potentials.

Whether this leads to a more extended form of speech, as Vygotsky [36] suggests, is discussable[§§]. In any case, though, to explain this aspect, another extension of the notion of dialogic speech must be made. Not only are there dialogic relations crystallized in written texts, but there are also dialogic relations in the very process of writing. Dialogue must be turned towards a merely imagined, even idealized other or towards oneself; it has to become something «inner». It is especially Voloshinov and Vygotsky who show how language can be conceptualized as an intrapersonal activity, which stays deeply social in nature.

In turning against the current approaches in the philosophy of language of his time, Voloshinov [33] criticizes the assumptions of what he calls «individualistic subjec- tivism» and «abstract objectivism». Individualistic sub­jectivism holds that in language, the individual speech act is crucial, and therefore the psychological processes of the individual determine language. In contrast, abstract objectivism supposes that the individual speech act can be neglected, because it does not belong to the system of language, which is ahistorical and supra-individual. With a synthesizing gesture, Voloshinov formulates his own position: «Language is a continuous generative process implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers» [33, p. 98, italics removed]. And further: «The laws of the generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of speakers. The laws of language generation are sociological laws» [33, p. 98, italics removed]. Like that, he conceptualizes language as both a psychological process and as social, i. e. dialogic. This is possible, because the individual consciousness follows social laws since it is «filled with signs» [33, p. 11]. In a similar movement, Vygotsky [34] formulates at the beginning of his psychological career his own view of conceptualizing consciousness as social, also finding a third way apart from the two major psychological tendencies of his times, subjective psychology and reflexology. There is, he states in a reflexological terminology, a special type of reflexes in humans, that are «reversible» [34, p. 277; 5, p. 105]. «A word that is heard is the irritant, and a word that is pronounced is a reflex producing the same irritant. The reflex is reversible here, since an irritant can become a reaction, and vice versa» [34, p. 277]. This is, for him, the reason, why the mechanisms of social interaction and of consciousness are the same[***]. The self becomes plural and dialogic in the sense that the child learns to address her- or himself and to be self and other at the same time. In a similar direction points Bakhtin, when he writes: «If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred. It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own 'I,' (sic!) and that 'I' that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by my own hair» [1, p. 256]. Inner dialogue and the management of various positions (self, self-as-other, real or imagined addressee, superaddressee) thus become a necessary feature in building complex chronotopical spheres of meaning on one's own, as it happens in narrative and to a greater or lesser extent in all forms of writing.

Implications for writing

These moments in a dialogical perspective on language — the dialogic tendencies in speech beyond face- to-face dialogue, the creative-semiotic nature of speech and the multiplicity of positions a speaker and especially a writer must assume — cannot stay without conse- quences if writing processes are the subject under study. There are two major implications for writing research undertaken from a dialogical stance: Firstly, writing must be seen in its relationship to other forms of speech activity like interpersonal and intrapersonal speech. And secondly, individual cognitive writing processes and socio-cultural writing practices are closely tied together and must be investigated in their interrelatedness.

Regarding the first aspect, writing, as the reading of the Soviet scholars shows, is not a completely new form of speech fully in its own right, because it cannot be separated from other forms of speech activity. It is closely linked with dialogue although the writer must abstract from oral communication and rely on inner dialogue. There can — but do not have to — be shifts of function like e.g. from communication with others to reflexive thinking for oneself. Such shifts go hand in hand with alterations in linguistic forms. In fact, there are several characteristics of writing that make such alterations necessary: the other is not there or at least cannot serve the same here-and-now collaborative function as in dialogue, the utterance becomes crystallized in a visible and mostly durable form etc. In writing one must create chrono- topically structured spheres of meaning on one's own with the resources at hand, but at the same time one necessarily relates to socially typical forms of speech or genres and different forms of addressees. Therefore, inner dialogue and the addressed character of writing become crucial notions to be methodologically considered. Without the inner «work» of the writer in relation to the written utterance, one cannot know what writing is.

A second implication is that contrary to current writing research traditions such as literacy studies and studies of the writing process in cognitive psychology, both individual writing processes and socio-cultural writing practices as well as their relationship must be considered. One needs to look neither only at the characteristics of utterances or texts that are carried forward by literate practices nor the social forms of interaction fostered by writing [e. g. 15; 30]. Nor is it enough to investigate the individual psychological processes during writing with computer-based real-time methods as if they were isolated from social practices[†††]. Both aspects are necessary, but writing is more than dealing with social and medium constraints or other influencing factors and processing information. It is creating spheres of meaning for others and oneself (as an other).

As a consequence, writing, taking into consideration its psychological volume, is not fully accessible to observation of supposedly writing-related practices on a macro-cultural level without looking at concrete writing activities of individuals. In one of his first sketches of his «Ethnography of Communication», Hymes [19, p. 25] criticizes the generalizing interpretations of literacy studies because they lack sufficient ethnographic data: «There is a tendency to take the value of a channel as given across cultures, but here, as with every aspect and component of communication, the value is problematic and requires investigation. (...) To provide a better ethnographic basis for the understanding of the place of alternative channels and modalities in communication is indeed one of the greatest challenges to studies of the sort we seek to encourage». On the other hand, experimental measuring of individual writing-related psychological processes with computer-based methods [e. g. 16; 8, various contributions to 29] methodologically ignores any grounding of writing in social interactions of various forms. These methods do allow experimental investigation of cognitive processes in the sense of in — and decrease of reaction times. But they cannot, by their very nature, investigate meaning-related psychological processes. Like this, both literacy studies and real-time cognitive approaches do not consider the creative and re-presenting meaning-making activity of the writer with regard to his or her addressees. The third influential approach in writing research, the tradition working with thinking-aloud protocols [seminal: 17; 18], investigates writing processes through introspection. However, this means to conceptualize writing as a conscious psychological process — especially when the thinking-aloud protocols are taken as indicators for the basic cognitive processes involved in text production and not as exteriorizations of complex inner dialogues with various functions during problem solving[‡‡‡]. Giving attention to the complex historicity and dialogi- cality of every utterance, the scope must be extended and comprise also more subtle processes than the ones that become voiced at once during thinking-aloud tasks. A methodology is needed that gives insight to the complex dialogicality of writing. As a consequence, in the remainder of the paper, one suggestion of such a methodological approach to writing is sketched[§§§].

Developing a dialogical methodology for writing research — a sketch

The writing research method described here is inspired by the method of auto-confrontation [9; 10; 11; 12]. The original auto-confrontation method was developed as a means of intervention in workplace psychology in a cultural-historical and activity theoretical tradition. It consists of three phases:

(1)      Constitution of an analysis group. The work collective chooses pairs of workers that, together with the researcher, form an analysis group.

(2)      Simple and crossed auto-confrontations. The chosen pairs are filmed during resembling work situations. First, every worker is confronted with the video of his or her own work activity in presence of the researcher (simple auto-confrontation). Then, for each pair of workers, every participant is confronted with the video of his or her respective colleague's work activity in presence of this colleague and of the researcher (crossed auto-confrontation). Both simple and crossed auto-confrontations are filmed, too.

(3)      Extension of analytical work to the work collective. An edition of the filmic material is presented to the whole work collective. The collective goes on with an analysis of the work situations and auto-confrontations filmed. [12, p. 21ff.]

Auto-confrontation in the narrow sense, i.e. the second phase, is of interest here. This phase consists of three succeeding steps: filming of a work situation, simple auto-confrontation and crossed auto-confrontation. Here, several dialogical characteristics of the method appear. The filming process provokes a self-observation of the worker [9; 10]. The activity of the other (researcher) is turned towards oneself in a reversing gesture; the worker's new observing perspective enters into a dialogic relationship with the old working one. Furthermore, through observation and videotaping, the working activity is actively set into a plurality of contexts, which go beyond the here-and-now [9; 10]. To put it differently, the activity takes place in and shapes various differing but related chronotopes at once. During simple auto-confrontation the newly emerged dialogue is set into another context where it can develop further [9; 10]. Understanding, according to Voloshinov [33], is answering, bringing an utterance (or here: filmic re-presentations of a work sequence) into a new context. Like this, the development that can happen in auto-confrontation can be conceptualized as an instance of «understanding-through-answering». Furthermore, the «volume» and the richness of the activity [12, p. 18; cf. also 34] become accessible in this new context: that is, not only what the worker did do, but also what he or she could not do, wanted or not to do etc. It is here, in interaction with a researcher alien to the work under scrutiny, that the tensions and relations between the personal style of doing this work and the collectively assumed, 'right' ways of doing it, what Clot and colleagues call «genre professionel» (professional genre) [12, p. 22; cf. also 2] or «collectif dans l'individu» (collective in the individual) [9, p. 226; cf. also 35], come to light[****]. Social practices, conventionalized ways of activity, shape the individual way of carrying out the work in a normative way and are in turn shaped by the workers' individual styles. Thus, the superaddressee's position enters the dialogue [9, 10; cf. also 3]. During crossed auto-confrontation, finally, the self-dialogue of one worker is confronted with the colleague's one. There, even activities that have not been questioned so far can become the object of discussion and development, because the worker is not just confronted with a normative, collective position but also with another individual style of carrying out the work. Further and even more important, two ways of perceiving social practice collide, which allows the workers to question this third superposition [9; 10].

For writing, the method can be adapted and variegated. First of all, the objectives change to a certain degree. Primary goal is not intervention, although change and development brought about by dialogic interactions on and recontextualizations of writing processes still form one objective and one of the reasons why the method brings about a more cooperative style of research, which includes participants as active partners. However, the method in particular leads to videos and then protocols of dialogic writing process reconstructions that can serve, in order to further understand writing, as an alternative or an extension to thinking- aloud protocols, external observations of different kinds, text analysis and computer-based experimentation.

The greatest alteration in comparison to the original method is the abandonment of crossed auto-confrontation. As long as the focus of interest comprises writing «in general», — or to put it more correctly: in its functional manifoldness and diversity [cf. 24] — and not a specific work genre, simple auto-confrontation and crossed auto-confrontation merge, since the researcher holds the position of both an alien person, in that he or she does not have direct access to the inner dialogicali- ty of the writer, and a peer, in that he or she belongs to the same community of speakers as the writer. Thus, the method consists of only two steps:

(1)       videotaping of a writing episode

(2)      co-analysis of the filmed writing episode in dialogue between writer and researcher.

In general, the dialogical mechanisms of the method are the same for writing as for working. The tensions between the corresponding genre and personal style, between what «one» has to do when writing the given kind of text and what «I» see myself doing on the screen, become voiced. Thus, the method aims at the complex interaction of social literal practices and psychological writing processes. Further, recursive form-giving and form-changing processes as they are experienced, «lived», during writing and relived during watching, become the object of co-analysis; processes of coming from vague thoughts writers can almost not grasp themselves to addressed utterances readers can understand. In the described variation of the method of auto-confrontation for writing research, the position of the cameras seem of special interest, implying the perspectives from which co-analysis can take its start, voicing positions of the writer's inner dialogue. To elaborate: The work of analysis, which in the original workplace method is divided between worker, co-worker, working collective and researcher, in the writing research variation lies on writer and researcher alone. But even in that dyadic form of interaction more than two positions of the writing dialogue can become voiced. Two cameras are employed for filming the writing episode. The first one records the writer in profile. The second one captures the evolving text from behind, «looking over the writer's shoulder» from an angle. For auto-confrontation both images are edited picture-in-picture and synchronized. However, both perspectives provoke different ways of looking at the writing process, for the participant as well as for the researcher. Whereas the profile perspective stands for a third party, non-involved position, participants tend to react strongly to the over- the-shoulder camera. This second camera holds a perspective that is similar, but not congruent with the writer's own perspective during composition. Rather, it involves a distance and closeness of observation at the same time. Like this, the perspective helps in eliciting and voicing addressee-positions involved in inner dialogue: perspectives of concrete or idealized addressees, of a generalized reader position involved in revision and editing processes, of the super-addressee, perspectives associated with normative, social practice related positions etc.

Putting the method to work

In order to implement the proposed methodological setting for writing research certain challenges have to be met. Firstly, it is not fully predictable what the concrete ways of voicing writing processes and practices as well as inner dialogicality in auto-confrontation situations will look like. This is especially important for analysis of the auto-confrontation protocols. Hints can be gained from auto-confrontation dialogues in workplace studies, which show for example that the ways of dealing with personal pronouns are a fruitful source to look at [e. g. 11]. Additional hints can come from studies with thinking-aloud protocols, where features like questions, formulations of goals or associative chains were taken as indication for e.g. planning or revision activities [cf. 17].

However, it is probable that the data goes beyond these features of evidence. Thus, it is crucial for the researcher to constantly monitor and reflect the choice of categories for analysis. The primary source and the horizon against which to evaluate categories and findings must be the outlined dialogical theory. This is important, for instance, for not falling into the trap of interpreting too much on a content level without considering the form-content relationship as it has been described above.

This leads to another consideration. Analyzing not only the protocols of auto-confrontation dialogues, but also the respective filmed writing episodes, where one can see the texts as they are produced, can be one way to avoid speculation. Further, this can reveal if the writers really do what they report and elaborate or if there is a discrepancy between the dialogic reconstruction during auto-confrontation and the episode itself. Possible differences, however, will not derogate the informative value of the auto-confrontation protocols, but only contribute to finding the complex relationship between inner dialogue in writing and what is actually written as well as between socially constructed writing practices and individual instances of writing activities

[*] An instance of the methodology to be sketched in this article was developed in the context of the author's dissertation project in preparation at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, Germany with the working title «Writing processes and writing practices. A conceptualization from a dialogical perspective». The project is funded by scholarships of Universitat Bayern e. V. and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat.