3. General Introduction
• Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born on November 16, 1895 in Orel, south Moscow.
• Bakhtin was bilingual (German & Russian) and started his education at home.
• He earned degree in classics and philology from the university of St. Petersburg in
1918.
• He studied Latin (specially Greek) at local university of Odessa in 1913.
• A Russian philosopher, linguist & philologist, continues Vygotsky's ideas & viewed
everything as a dialogue.
Bakhtin underlined dialogism is a general framework for the understanding of human
action, cognition, communication and language.
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4. Cont’d…
• Dialogism is a counter-theory to monologism, which is associated with individualism
and representationalism.
• Dialogue takes place both internally (with in the individual) and externally (with
others).
• Cognition occoures when learners are given an opportunity to practice dialogue.
• Dialogism focuses on the social nature of language and literature.
• Bakhtin begins by accepting Kant’s argument that there is an unbridgeable gap
between mind and world.
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5. Cont’d…
• Dialogism argues that we make sense of existence by defining our specific place
in it, an operation performed in cognitive time and space, the basic categories of
perception.
• Views children as a result of their family culture (Children see the world through
the signs of their parents ).
• Education is the process of overcoming restrictions in the child through active
intervention by adults who make a “loan of consciousness” from their
“monopoly of foresight.”
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6. Cont’d…
• The psyche enjoys extraterritorial status in the organism. It is a social
entity that penetrates inside the organism of the individual person…
• Emphasizes on the importance of literature and novel in human life.
• Human body becomes a consciousness when its aboriginal signals are
enriched by the signs we acquire in language.
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8. Three Dialogical Principles
Sequentiality
• A dialogue cannot be adequately characterized as a series of individual actions. Each
utterance by any speaker is dependent on what his/hers interlocutor(s) do(es) in the same
interaction.
• This is a part of a social practice, in which actors interact and communicate, and in which
the individual contributions cannot be understood in isolation from each other .
• The turns are sequentially organized, i.e. their interactional significance is intrinsically
dependent on their positioning in the sequence.
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9. Cont’d…
Sequentiality and Coordination
• The principle of Sequentiality does not necessarily mean that utterances
and actions literally follow each other in the interaction. They can be
simultaneous or partially overlap.
• Separate actions by different speakers must be coordinated and mutually
adjusted in a subtle process of dovetailing utterance
• This joint alignment involves pace and rhythm, stress and intonation
patterns, and non- verbal accompaniment.
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10. Cont’d…
Joint constructions
• Language and discourse are fundamentally social phenomena. The language used in
communication is of a social interactional.
• A dialogue is a joint construction . It is something which participants possess, experience
and do together.
• The collective construction is made possible by the reciprocally and mutually coordinated
actions and interactions by different actors.
• No part is entirely one single individuals product and experience
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11. Cont’d…
• Even sentence-sized (or smaller) constituent expressions are jointly produced. But also
lengthy monological speech events (or written texts) are dialogically built up. It has a
social character in that they are other-oriented. They are designed for some recipients.
• Virtual joint construction in interactions with virtual others
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12. Cont’d…
Act-activity interdependence
• Acts, utterances and sequences are always essentially situated within an embedding
activity (dialogue, encounter) which the interactants jointly produce.
• This activity can most often be seen as representing some activity type or as belonging to
a particular genre.
• This activity type or genre is shown in a wittgensteinian sense, i.e. implicitly shown rather
than explicitly formulated (Said), in the ways actors express themselves in discourse.
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13. Key Features of Dialogism
Utterance is the basic building block in dialogic approach and involves others.
The aim of the dialogic approach is to support the inclusion of voices of those
who have traditionally been excluded.
It accounts for the socio-political aspects of the language learning.
Shift to teacher-centered to dialogic, interactive, participatory learning as social
practice that is situated with in the educational and community contexts.
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14. Principles of Dialogic Teaching
Teaching is more likely to be dialogic if it is:
Collective- Participants address learning tasks together.
Reciprocal-Participants listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints.
Supportive-Pupils express their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’
answers, and they help each other to reach common understandings.
Cumulative- Participants build on answers and other oral contributions and chain them into
coherent lines of thinking and understanding.
Purposeful-Classroom talk, though open and dialogic, is also planned and structured with
specific learning goals in view.
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15. Nature of the Classroom
In dialogic classrooms children don’t just provide brief factual answers to ‘test’ or ‘recall’
questions, or merely spot the answer which they think the teacher wants to hear. Instead
they learn and are encouraged to:
narrate explore explain
analyze speculate imagine
evaluate discuss argue
justify ask questions of their own
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16. Limitations
I did not find any criticism on his works. However, I feel dissatisfaction from the work of
Bakhtin on the following points.
• It gives more emphasis for communication than independent activities.
• Dialogism may not be the best way to educate young children. Therefore; Bakhtin did not
consider young children’s style of learning.
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17. Conclusion
• Dialogism encourages teachers to practice discourse based learning.
• Consciousness is the result of two way communication either with text or persons.
• Language in social context determines learning among humans.
• Children start learning at their home. Therefore; curriculum design has to consider
this.
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