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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.

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]

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.

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]

Abstract Combining cultural-historical and dialogical theoretical approaches, we understand language and the self as dialogically related dynamic phenomena. Learning is a dialogic activity shaped by language activity. The specific forms of language that learning activity takes are at the core of our research, leading to a form sensitive concept of professional development. It addresses societal contexts and others as formative and highlights voicings as concrete forms experienced by learning subjects, traceable in the dialogues on the subject's activity. The case study presents the learning activities of early childhood education (ECE) students and teachers within university level training. Video stimulated reflection and interviews were taken as qualitative research strategies to investigate the positioning processes within the dialogical self of students reflecting on their pedagogical practices. With the "Teacher Interaction and Language Rating Scale" (Girolametto et al., 2000) we measured the interaction quality of the language activities in the classroom. The results illustrate the powerful dynamics of the dialogical learning activity: the kind of voicings emerging within the process of acquiring a 'professional self' and their effects on the self-transformative learning process. The ambivalence within learners' self is demonstrated, pointing to a genetic relationship between self-reflective and social positionings within the ECE community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociogenesis addresses a pervasive problem in psychology given by Cartesian dualism that assigns the mental an inner locus apart from material activity. Aligning ourselves to the ongoing critical discussions of interiorization in psychology, we explore the crucial notion of space by highlighting language as sociocultural and dialogical activity performed by other-oriented individuals. We discuss space in terms of the “language spacetime”, a symbolic, embodied formation of mutually positioned speaking and listening selves. This leads beyond the “inside-outside” container metaphor and allows for a reformulation of interiorization. Interiorization is conceptualized as a continuous series of different, though mutually related movements between self and other and self and self that lead to and are supported by specific formations in language activity: reversion, transposition, and decoupling. Along a short passage of a video-based interview, we trace the reversion of dialogical positions within the addressivity constellation of the two interlocutors, their interactive creation of a heterotopic spacetime, and the decoupling of one speaker's psychological activity from the concrete here-and-now and the present other by moving and acting into this new sphere. Interiorization appears as a movement at the border of past, present, and possible future(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the problem of foreign language training of future artists in higher educational establishments. The main feature of English for specific purposes (ESP) is a professionally oriented approach to learning English. It involves the formation of students’ ability to foreign language communication in specific areas and situations. Permanent and variable characteristics of a foreign language for specific purposes are given. The main issues of studying ESP by art students include the specifics of lexical content and special format of oral and written texts related to the profession. With the help of dominant perceptual modality diagnostics by S. Yefremtsev, we have defined that 95% of all respondents refer to the visual type. The common features of visuals were taken into account in creating the system of classes based on the communicative approach and the principle of visual perception of information. The article analyzes the content and feasibility of the ESP textbook specially created for future artists. Main lingo-didactic (general teaching) principles of training of speech activity types are described. They include: specific professional area, complexity and interconnectedness of learning types of speech activity, dominance of one type of speech activity at a certain stage of training, learning objectives, gradual and consistent skills formation, the text as a basis for any kind of speaking, the richness of analytical tools in every form of speaking, facilities, and advanced technology training. The article proves the necessity of using Internet resources in teaching ESP.

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]