Am now drifting glassy-eyed and circling the black academic sink-hole that is Christmas. Despite my best intentions I still haven't managed to tackle my supervisor's comments concerning my thesis chapter. But I have decided to wait - for the sake of the family - until at least Christmas and Boxing Day are over for that and content myself instead with some background reading during the periphery of the day. I am tackling a revised and expanded edition of Lev Vygotsky's Thought and Language which is absolutely fascinating. He critiques Piaget's hypothesis that children's language moves from personal ('autistic') speech towards the communicative and social and offers his own view that, as speech is primarily about the communication of need, it starts as social and ends up as inner locution. 'Egocentric speech' (speech to oneself) instead of being, as Piaget suggested, a half-way house in the process of the externalisation of the child's language, emerges rather - according to Vygotsky - when 'the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions'.
I can kid myself that this may be useful! It probably will not be, but at least I feel that I am maintaining a toe-hold in the academic process.
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