Joanne Hardman

Variation in semiotic mediation across different pedagogical contexts

Abstract This article highlights the role of teacher talk as a semiotic, mediational means in fulfilling the Vygotskian calling of schools – the development of scientific concepts and higher cognitive functions. The author argues that the developmental importance of semiotic mediation points to the need to understand the developmental consequences of variation in semiotic mediation, which leads to the appropriation of different psychological tools. Given the importance of semiotic mediation in the development of higher cognitive functions, such as mathematical calculations and reasoning, this paper asks what happens to semiotic mediation when one changes the pedagogical context, in this case face-to-face mathematics lessons and computer-based mathematics lessons. Four teachers and 179 students in a rural Western Cape, South African school participated in the small scale exploratory case study. Findings indicate that there is significant variation in semiotic mediation across contexts, which calls into que...

The Developmental Impact of Communicative Interaction

This bold claim made by the sociolinguist Michael Halliday points to the developmental importance of language. This quotation resonated with a piece of research I was doing in an extremely disadvantaged kindergarten in the Western Cape region of South Africa. The research focused on Sipho and Nandi’s verbal interaction as they were trying to build a train out of a variety of blocks. Of particular interest was how these two three-year-old children used language (in this case their mother tongue is isiXhosa, the first language of the majority of people in the Western Cape, South Africa) to solve a problem that they encountered building this train. This use of language as a problem-solving tool soon became of major interest in the research because it resonated so well with the psychological theory of learning postulated by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978). Of particular interest in this context is trying to understand how humans learn together through communicative interaction. Figure 1.1 below illustrates these children as they solved their problem together.

#RhodesMustFall: Using social media to "decolonise" learning spaces for South African higher education institutions: A cultural historical activity theory approach

Since the end of 2015, South African universities have been the stage of ongoing student protests that seek to shift the status quo of Higher Education Institutes through calls to decolonise the curriculum and enable free access to HEIs for all. One tool that students have increasingly turned to, to voice their opinions has been social media. In this article we argue that one can use Cultural Historical Activity Theory to understand how the activity systems of the traditional academy are shifting the wake of social media, with traditional power relations becoming more porous as students’ voices gain an audience. By tracing the historical development of CHAT, we show how 4 th generation CHAT enables us to analyse potential power shifts in HEIs brought about through the use of social media.

“You focus, I’m talking”: A CHAT analysis of mobile dictionary use in an advanced EFL class

ABSTRACT This article discusses how students and teachers in an Advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class in Cape Town, South Africa, construct meaning through mobile phones. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), mobile phones are viewed as cultural artefacts that learners and teachers engage in the construction of meaning-making practices resulting in contradictions that potentially lead to radical transformation in the object and subject positions offered in the classroom. The case study was located in a Cape Town EFL institution with 14 adult foreign language learners and two foreign language teachers as participants. The findings indicated potential primary contradictions in division of labour and object owing to the teachers’ uptake of communicative language teaching (CLT) practices and their institutional roles. As contradictions must necessarily lead to change in a system, the authors propose that the use of mobile technology has the capacity to shift pedagogy in this context.