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This article highlights the difficulties arising when conducting listening comprehension in modern English language teaching methodology. The article analyzes in detail the main difficulties students face during the language learning process, especially when acquiring auditory skills. The results of the analysis suggest that the mastery of such a language activity as listening comprehension allows a person to understand clearly what is being communicated to them and to respond adequately to what is said, helps correctly present their response to the opponent, which account for the dialogic speech basis. In order not to make the language learning process successful and fruitful, both educators and students should be able to identify, realize, analyze and overcome the obstacles encountered in the process of teaching and mastering listening comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article raises the problem of philosophical principles and origins of Ferdinand de Saussure's views. The editors of "Course in General Linguistics", C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, contributed to the emergence of stereotypes about Saussure as the founder of structuralism, who for the first time conceptually distinguished language and speech based on dichotomy, established the systemic nature of language as an abstract entity, developed a bilateral psychological theory of sign and divided linguistics into the synchronous and the diachronic. This prevented the synthesis of Saussure's concept as a holistic and internally consistent anthropocentric system of views. The conceptual analysis of the fundamental theses of Saussure's concept, given in Saussure's autographed materials, which appeared in 2002, showed that its most important feature is that it was an anthropocentric nomothetic proposition aimed at creating the foundations for the study of human language activity as such, language as such and speech as such. The Kantian idea of anthropocentric transcendentalism can be considered the principal philosophical source of Saussure's nomothetic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the basic theories and approaches to language as a game. Although the focus is on the postmodernist approach, it is noted that language was considered as a play by representatives of the pre-postmodern philosophical currents. A game is a certain activity aimed at entertaining or having a good time, and usually aims at winning. The article also discusses the issues of winning language games and the enjoyment aspect of the gameplay itself. The main similarity between using language and playing is that there are certain rules in both of these activities that must be followed in order for the gameplay to be successful. However, even this postulate is criticized by postmodern authors, and the role of clear, fixed rules in language games becomes less fundamental to their successful functioning. The purpose of the article is to find out what kind of language games are described in postmodern philosophy. According to this goal, the task is to analyze the basic theories of language games and derive from them the benefit for modern humanities in understanding how the language works. By analyzing postmodern theories of speech activity, we conclude that in postmodernism, attitudes toward language play are extremely relatable. The rules of the game can be leveled, different games can be mixed together and take on new forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do ideas come into being? Our contribution takes its starting point in an observation we made in empirical data from a prior study. The data center around an instant of an academic writer's thinking during the revision of a scientific paper. Through a detailed discourse-oriented micro-analysis, we zoom in on the writer's thinking activity and uncover the genesis of a complex idea through a sequence of interrelated moments. These moments feature different degrees of "crystallization" of the idea; from gestures, a sketch, a short written note, oral explanations to a final spelled-out written argument. For this contribution, we re-analyze the material, asking how the idea gets formed during the thinking process and how it reaches a tangible form, which is understandable both for the thinker and for other persons. We root our analysis in a notion of language as social, embodied, and dialogical activity, drawing on concepts from Humboldt, Jakubinskij, and Vygotsky. We focus our analysis on three conceptual nodes. The first node is the ebbing and advancing of language in idea formation – observable as a trajectory through linguistically more condensed or more expanded utterance forms. The second node is the degree of objectification that the idea reaches when it is performed differently in a variety of addressivity constellations, i.e., whether and how it becomes understandable to the thinker and to others in the social sphere. Finally, the third node is the saturation of the idea through what we call intrapersonal intertextuality, i.e., its complex and dialogically related re-articulations in a sequence of formative moments. With these considerations, we articulate a clear consequence for theorizing thinking. We hold that thinking is social, embodied, and dialogically organized because it is entangled with language. Ideas come into being and become understandable and communicable to other persons only by and within their different, yet, intertextually related formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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My starting point is a dialogical notion of language that puts forth language activity as a dynamic process performed by subjects conceived as dialogical selves. Obviously, the language performance taking place at a specific moment is not pure momentaneity, not only unique but also well-known, it can be identified and recognized. What, then, grants the performance order and makes it non-arbitrary? To preserve the priority of the performance of language activity one has to conceive of a structuring moment other than some supra-individual system that is upstream to performance. This leads to the “in-between”: the principal assumption is that relata are constituted by an in-between, understood as a medium-generating relatedness, and thus the relata as such. Seeing language as that medium, I look at the way it functions, how it supplies forms as possibilities of generating a communicable and understandable subjectivity. Time is a key notion to this questioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research in a dialogical paradigm highlights processes and insists on human beings’ relatedness. The basic move is thus a shift from the self-contained “I” to the related self, where the other is seen as the self’s pre-condition. This must be accompanied by a similar shift with regard to language: language has to be viewed as a genuinely dialogical and plural phenomenon. Through five target articles and four commentaries addressing themes across the articles, this special issue takes a close look at the relationship between language and the self and explores some of the topics surfacing within the dialogical perspective: the “in-between” of the related subjects; movements, such as in speaking, listening, thinking, and writing, as an inherent part of the dynamics of the selves’ relatedness. As a result, language gets a rhetorical, phenomenal volume, and the subject is conceived as a self by virtue of its language performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]