Abstract

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the ‘level’ of the child and the ‘level’ of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky’s ZPD—the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the maturity of still-dependent functions in children. But this conception of the ZPD conflates two very different kinds of level: that of the child and that of the child’s social milieu. We propose instead an analysis of child speech using Halliday’s work on child development and his systemic-functional linguistics. We measure the emergence of modality, abstraction, and explicit clause Theme in Korean. We analyze four conversations with a single child over three years—from age four to seven. We find that there is a strong shift in the proportion of her clauses devoted to modal probability and towards explicit, textual themes. Counterintuitively, however, the nominal groups in her vocabulary become more concrete rather than more abstract. We conclude that Vygotsky’s ZPD can be accurately gauged and traced through speech development, but for that very reason it cannot be reliably explained by either the child or the environment.

摘要

老师和家长凭直觉判断孩子的“水平”和课文的“水平”，并尝试匹配；他们知道高估或低估任何一方都会导致不安或无聊。通过这种方式，他们对维果茨基的 ZPD 有了经验性的理解——他设想的最近发展区是衡量儿童仍然依赖功能的成熟度。但是这种 ZPD 概念将两种截然不同的层次混为一谈：儿童的层次和儿童社会环境的层次。我们建议使用 Halliday 关于儿童发展的工作和他的系统功能语言学来分析儿童语言。我们测量了韩语中情态、抽象和显式从句主题的出现。我们分析了与一个孩子在三年内（从四岁到七岁）的四次对话。我们发现她的从句中专注于模态概率和明确的文本主题的比例发生了很大的变化。然而，与直觉相反的是，她词汇中的名词性群体变得更加具体而不是更加抽象。我们得出的结论是，维果斯基的 ZPD 可以通过语言发展准确地测量和追踪，但正因如此，无论是儿童还是环境都无法可靠地解释它。