Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and some ruminations on the development of narrative sensibility in children

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and argue that Vygotsky was aware of them and working to overcome them when he died. I then use the more holistic methods suggested by his late lectures, Hasan’s criticisms, and Halliday and Matthiessen’s work on systemic-functional semantics to show development of narrative in Korean school children. In accordance with Hasan’s criticism, there was no obvious difference at the level of lexical word meanings. But there was a significant increase in embedding, in mental over material processes, and in ‘internal’ over ‘external’ cohesion, all of which suggest what Vygotsky calls the development of ‘inner perezhivanie’ at school age.