The Other’s Voice in the Co-Construction of Self-Reference in the Dialogic Child

Abstract

Bakhtin’s deep insights on dialogicality resonates with views of language acquisition as a multimodal, situated, interactive process grounded in everyday experience and reverberating the voices of the care-givers. Drawing on a longitudinal videoethnography of French parent-child interactions in family life over a period of seven years, this study documents how the child’s language development is co-constructed through interactive tellings and retellings of activities and events permeated with multiple perspectives. Our choice of extracts will exemplify how the others’ voices shape children’s unique identity as speaker and co-speaker grounded in the richness of their daily life. Through the experience of assimilating the others’ words, utterances, and every single form of multimodal expression, children appropriate our common treasure, language, but also learn the individual power of accenting their productions with their own voice.