Ecology and development in classroom communication

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 149–165

Ecology and development in classroom communication

William Barowy a,∗, Jeanne Elser Smith b

a Lesley University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United Statesb Lilja Elementary School Natick, MA, United States

Abstract

Drawing upon observer participation in a first grade classroom, we present a systemic functional analysis of classroom com-munication located in relation to social semiotics, cultural historical activity theory, and ecological psychology, relating contextto meaning making. Two years of observation include field notes, student assessments, audio and video recordings, photographicsurveys, interviews and discussions with the teacher, her colleagues, and the school principal. Qualitative methods inform thecoordination of the theoretical frameworks, incorporating their key concepts for a more comprehensive understanding of teaching,learning, and development than any one alone can offer. Extending the examination of variations in register to include the physicalelements of context, we present four episodes occurring with distinctive registers of communication, social organization, and con-figuration of artifacts in space and time. The analysis spans scales of language, social organization, space, and time to expand thenotions of register and cohesion. We introduce the concepts of contextual cohesion and semiotic proximity in explanation of thepatterns we find in meaning making.© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Activity; Cohesion; Context; Contextual cohesion; Cultural historical activity theory; Ecological psychology; Intertextuality; Mean-ing making; Meaning potential; Register; Semiotic proximity; Social semiotics; Synomorphy; Systemic functional linguistics; Zone of proximaldevelopment

1. Semiotic complexity and the elementary classroom

A first grade classroom in the Lilja Elementary School (2005) forms the observational basis for this study. Likeother elementary classrooms we have seen or participated in, this room’s physical appearance becomes remarkablycomplex during the school year. To convey a sense of this complexity, we will provide a short and dense description,drawn from data taken in January. We use capitals to acknowledge not only the bounded concentrations in activity,space, and time called synomorphs (Barker, 1949, 1968), but also the artifacts that the children frequently access.

Entering the room, looking from left to right, one sees a lunch chart that doubles as a classroom sign-out. Ashelved cart holds bins of books while also separating the Library from the rest of the classroom. Three large tablesand one small table take up much of the floor space. Under the windows on the opposite wall, manipulative mate-rials called Morning Graph, Money Chart, and Straw Chart sit prominently on top of open shelves containing othermaterials. In the far corner, and on the heater, are boxes that hold folders of the students’ work. Above them is abulletin board entitled “Class Expectations” that the children generated in September, guided by Jeanne, their teacher

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 617 349 8168; fax: +1 617 349 8169.E-mail address: [email protected] (W. Barowy).

0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.linged.2008.05.004

mailto:[email protected]

dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2008.05.004

150 W. Barowy, J.E. Smith / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 149–165

and the coauthor of this paper. Nearer, a large Red Rug lay in front of an easel, teacher chair, and a small book-shelf of read-aloud books. An adjacent small white board contains the day’s reading- and writing-workshop schedule.Above the rug, on a large white-board, one sees the Day Schedule, Job Schedule, monthly calendar, a “Days ofthe Year” tally, Weather Chart, Temperature Chart, and a Word Wall. Above the white board are students’ draw-ings, writings, and student-made alphabet charts. To the far right, and still closer, a small Yellow Rug lay in frontof two more easels. At opposite ends of the room, two doors lead to the adjoining classrooms. There are manyhundreds of books of all sizes in bins and on shelves throughout the room, many of which the teacher personallyowns.

Walking into the room further, one sees a glimmer of a teacher desk, hidden at first by shelves holding bins ofmaterials, draft boxes and the room’s solitary student desk. Covering the teacher’s desk are her weekly planner, pilesof activity sheets and the books that she uses most often. An adjoining bookshelf holds those books she uses less often.On the wall next to her desk are the specialist schedule, the gymnasium schedule and a recess schedule. In the tradelanguage of literacy teaching, the classroom design is print-rich and learner-centered (Avery, 2002; Fountas & Pinell,1996), but to a newcomer, the room’s appearance often appears busy or cluttered with the number and types of books,manipulatives, art, photos, and props.

It is striking how complicated this first grade classroom is in its spatial and semiotic formation and in the organizationof what happens there over minutes, days, weeks, and the school year. First, while accountable for 23 children thisparticular year, of whom one quarter have special needs, Jeanne juggles lunch, recess, specialist, art room, libraryand computer lab schedules, ensuring that the children encounter reading, writing and math everyday, supplementingwith science and social studies, while differentiating instruction with frequent assessments. Second, upon enteringfirst grade, the children experience an ecological transition (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), often engaging in unfamiliarpatterns of participation in a fresh physical setting (Clay, 1991). Children make new social relations and begin to learnschools’ specialized and highly scripted forms of social organization (Gutierrez, 1993; Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson,1995; Mehan, 1979; Nelson, 1981). In first grade, children’s development in attention, memory, and self-regulationencounters steepened challenges (DeMarie-Dreblow & Miller, 1988; Miller & Weiss, 1981; National Institute of ChildHealth and Human Development [NICHD], 2005a). Furthermore, responding to the “transition to school and thedemands of literacy” (Wells, 1994, p. 69), first graders make dramatic gains in written language (NICHD, 2005b).Third, the classroom design changes from year to year. At the start of each school year, Jeanne anticipates her children’sneeds, based upon what she has learned about their Kindergarten experiences. For example, the yellow rug and secondmeeting area were not present in either the prior or the following year, and the table configurations have changed everyyear.

Observing Jeanne and her children communicating and learning with such a complex, dense and changing arrange-ment of semiotic artifacts makes one pause and wonder: How is meaning making in this classroom related to its socialand material organization? What changes over time?

These questions inquire about the contextual, functional and changing nature of classroom communication. Inresponse, this article coordinates 2 years of participant observation with key concepts in social semiotics, ecologicalpsychology and cultural historical activity theory, relating context to meaning making. We propose to call the confluenceof these theories semiotic ecology, an orientation we have adapted from Lang, which conceptualizes “people and thingsin places of inter-activity as evolving ecosystems” (Lang, 1997, p 192). The units of analysis intrinsic to each constituenttheory of semiotic ecology, e.g. text, synomorph, activity structure and activity system, enable analysis that spans acrossscales of space, time, and social organization. The analysis works neither inductively from the data, nor deductivelyfrom theory, but dialectically, relating observations and theories in complementary fashion to study communicativemeaning making, i.e. the communication of what Lemke (1990) terms thematic content.

This paper has the following organization. First, it identifies key theoretical concepts and the observation andanalysis methods applied to locate patterns in relations between meaning making processes and their contexts. Itdescribes the unit of the school and its last decade of development. Next, it “zooms-in” to a microgenetic discussionof teacher planning and classroom design that integrates her experience over the past year, projecting into the next, toexplain the functional design of the classroom. Descriptions of three episodes follow that occur with distinctive formsof communication, social organization, and configuration of artifacts in space and time. The paper concludes with atheoretical discussion including the material and semiotic configuration of the classroom’s design, its functionality incommunication, its changes over time, and its relation to meaning making. It introduces the concepts of contextualcohesion and semiotic proximity in explanation of the patterns found.

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2. Cohesion, synomorphy, and activity

The earlier description of the classroom illustrates how, as is common in other primary classrooms in mid-year, thereare many kinds of communication. There are children’s books published in many different literary genres and levelsand there are books specifically for the teacher. Of great importance in literacy instruction, there are texts and drawingscreated by the children (Avery, 2002; Clay, 2001). Finally, there are specialized forms of talk occurring (Christie, 1991,1995; Mehan, 1979). Our analysis of talk and its relation to the classroom, the people in it and other texts will drawupon and extend the notion of cohesion, an elaborate taxonomy of references (semiotic resources) for making meaningof a text by connecting one part of the text to another (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Related to cohesion, intertextuality,developed by Kristeva (1980) and elaborated by Lemke (1985) articulates the processes of making meaning of a textin relation to a plurality of other texts, generally across time scales longer than that of a single text. Meaning potentialrefers to a set of socially contextualized language resources for communication, i.e. language as related to its situationsof use (Halliday, 1975, 1978). Register is the restricted range of meaning potential that becomes active in a situation,shaped by what people are doing, what are their relations to each other, and how they use language (Halliday, 1978).These three dimensions of register are field, tenor, and mode.

Lemke (1985) points to the limitations of the notion of register when accounting for meaning making across textsand social practices. In contrast, the cultural–historical activity theoretic principle of activity describes collaborativeactions with a social-systemic focus (theoretically the object of the activity) that often takes shape over a substantialperiod of time (Engestrom, 1987, 1991; Leont’ev, 1981a,b). Cultural and historical mediation by social relations andartifacts,1 both material and ideal, is a central tenet of activity theory (Cole, 1996) and, in our view, forms a foundationalrelationship among all three frameworks. We identify the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) to be essentialfor investigating how the work of adults and children transforms into children’s development. Wells (1994, 1996) hasdiscussed combining the theories of Halliday and activity as a basis for a more comprehensive theory of education thaneither alone offer. He has also shown how communication, including gestures, can be addressed with activity theorybut has not attended to the cohesive aspects of communication in his studies (Wells, 2002, 2007).

We employ two units of analysis that can extend beyond the temporal borders of an episode and its immediatesocial relations, and, especially, to include artifacts. The first is an activity system (Engestrom, 1987) and the secondis an activity structure2 (Lemke, 1990). We include the school as a unit of analysis, as an activity system.3 Whilenot isolated, the school is relatively autonomous during its operation. The elements of this activity system include acollective subject and specialized relations in the form of a division of labor, with a principal, teachers, specialists,psychologist, nurse, etc. Over a decade the principal of the school systemically and systematically reshaped the schoolto better meet its mission (theoretically the object of the activity). “Our mission is to help all children realize their fullpotential and become self-confident learners.” (Lilja, 2005) The school adopted two curricula (artifacts) that span allgrades, one for mathematics (TERC, 1998) and one for social and emotional development (Open Circle, 2006; Taylor,Laing, Tracy, Williams, & Seigle, 2002). Simultaneously the school developed common practices and understandingsabout literacy instruction.

The physical artifacts in the classroom take up space, and the forms of the artifacts and their negative spaces (emptyspaces) correspond to what people are doing to them and with them. When Jeanne sits in the author’s chair and reads abook aloud, the class has converged to an intimate gathering on the Red Rug where the children can hear her speak andsee the book pages. Collaborative activities take place on any flat surfaces in the classroom that make sharing easier,especially the tables and the rugs. At the borders of context, the material organization of the room bounds lessonsin space and schedules bound them in time. Inside those (permeable and soft) borders, the material organization ofartifacts both forms people’s activity and conforms to it—should Jeanne turn the read-aloud book toward her, thechildren would no longer be able to see its pages. When the book is oriented to face the children so they may read,it functions differently in literacy instruction than one oriented away from them. The principle of synomorphy in

1 Artifacts in activity theory function three ways, as classified by Wartofsky (1979). Primary artifacts function directly in activity, e.g. tables andchairs. Secondary artifacts function in the preservation and development of skills or modes of action, e.g. a schedule or a worksheet. Tertiary artifactsfunction in imaginative human activity, e.g. the means teachers use to forecast and plan the use of their classroom.

2 Activity structures depict patterned discourse and social organization, such as triadic dialogue.3 “Activity systems evolve over lengthy periods of socio-historical time, often taking the form of institutions and organizations” (Daniels, 2001,

p. 86).


Ecological Psychology (Barker, 1968) describes how the designs of the physical and material elements of a contextcohere with what people do with them and in them.

3. Methods

Central to this study is the identification of meaning-making forms and processes in and around the first gradeclassroom. To document these and to locate them with respect to theory, we assembled a corpus of data from July 2003until January 2006. Because of our interest in including spatial and artifact relations, our data includes the identificationof behavior settings (Barker, 1949, 1968) and records of artifacts, in addition to direct recordings and observations.We conducted photographic surveys of the classroom, took field notes of classroom activities, and made video andaudio recordings of selected lessons and moments in the classroom. We recorded audio and field notes of interviewswith Jeanne’s colleagues and the school principal, as well as most debriefings at the end of the day. Our ensemble ofartifacts includes Jeanne’s weekly planners and assessments of the children’s reading and writing, taken yearlong.

We conducted a contextual functional temporal analysis of communication across multiple scales of space,social organization and time. Precursors of this approach appear in discussions of prolepsis Cole (1996), intertex-tuality (Lemke, 1985), heterochrony (Lemke, 2000a), complex self-organizing systems (Lemke, 2000b), and theco-development of individuals and institutions (Barowy & Jouper, 2004; Cole, 1995), which identify how humanactivity, communication and development cross scales of time and social organization.

Beginning with the mesogenetic (institutional) scale, we adapted the expansive methodology developed byEngestrom (1987). First, this means modeling the school as an activity system, identifying the object of schooling,i.e. the school’s mission, and its specialized artifacts, e.g. curricula, educational software, leveled books, instructionalscripts, etc. Second, an historical investigation located artifacts, including language, curricula, and practices, that teach-ers came to share across the Lilja activity system, and identifying those that Jeanne has taken up, contributing to thedevelopment of communication in her classroom. Finally, we examined the history and present status of the LiljaSchool, informed by its principal’s viewpoint of change in the last decade, by making observations of teaching teamand curriculum meetings, and by locating developmental tensions within the system. In activity theory, contradictionsmanifested as tensions, dilemmas, disturbances, and problems are developmental potentials, as they can motivate achange in social organization and practice to address the contradiction (Barowy & Jouper, 2004; Engestrom, 1987).

At the beginning of each school year, we documented changes Jeanne made in the physical organization of theclassroom as she considered the learning requirements of her new students, and recorded her explanations as she wasdoing so. Across the span of months to a school year, we examined changes occurring in teaching and learning practices(social organization) and the spatial and temporal organization of the classroom. To ascertain the functional relationsbetween these forms of organization and the goals of the teacher, we analyzed the evidence of cohesion in Jeanne’sexplanation of the changes as she was planning them.

We adapted the approach of examining variations in register (Halliday, 1978; Wells, 1994) to broaden the analyses ofregister for all four activity structures described below. Cultural historical activity theory provides a powerful analyticframework for extending the analysis of field and tenor (Wells, 1999), and includes identifying joint goal-orientedactions, mediation by artifacts, rules, community relations, and a division of labor, and the essential dimensions thatculture and history bring to the constitution of context. While mode traditionally includes the role of language, suchas speaking or writing, it also includes cohesive functions of the text (Halliday, 1978). We have also broadened theconcept of cohesion to account for other modes of classroom communication, including gestures and references outsideof the text.

4. Scales of language, activity, space, and time

The setting of this study is the Lilja School, an activity system located in a middle class town on the urban fringeof Boston with a mostly Caucasian population of slightly over 32,000. Lilja serves about 400 students, almost evenlydistributed from kindergarten to fourth grade (MDOE, 2005).

What is striking about this school is its tranquility. There is a conspicuous absence of aggression. For instance, anychild running in the hall hears “Stop” in a firm and calm voice, accompanied by a gesture that is identical to what apolice officer uses in traffic. Both adults and children throughout the school use this sign, and others, to communicatenon-verbally. The gestures are part of the Open Circle curriculum. Open Circle is a comprehensive yearlong social and


emotional learning program. It includes “a consistent set of concepts across all grades, and these essential concepts areexplored in greater depth and reinforced as students proceed from year to year, building a common vocabulary that isshared by the entire school community” (Open Circle, 2006).

The school’s recent history is significant. The principal, Mary Canner, encouraged the adoption of Open Circle adecade earlier, in her first year at Lilja. She described the school upon her arrival as a “good typical school with a widerange of practices”, but without a consistent vision for teaching the children. Best practices were scattered throughoutthe school (2004). Mary spent her first years working toward improving teaching practices systemically. She notes,“Within three years a lot had happened and then within the next two years that really became solidified”. After threeyears, the school won an Exemplary Reading Program Award, sponsored by the International Reading Association.Working with every teacher, Mary led the adoption of a comprehensive mathematics curriculum (TERC, 1998) andshared literacy practices and understandings. Mary asserts “The thing that makes this school strong is that we all havea shared language and approach; whether it is for social competency, literacy learning, or math”.

Presently there is a high degree of coordination and communication among the professional staff, with ad hocconversations occurring during lunch, recess, before and after school. In biweekly meetings, teacher and curriculumteams focus on specific topics, and confer on such practical tasks as constructing shared student assessments. The OpenCircle and the mathematics curriculum are the bases for intertextuality between and among grade levels, among bothadults and children. In addition, there are a great many artifacts shared among the classrooms, from math lessons andassessments, to common practices and understandings, and arguably, the most important is the language that teachersshare in the three content areas of literacy, social development, and mathematics.

4.1. Semiotic ecology and preparation

To document how the spatial and material elements of context contribute to meaning making over time, we examinethe physical environment and the “behind the scenes” work of the teacher in planning and configuring the physicalelements of the setting. Our unit of analysis extends beyond the text to the full semiotic ecology of the classroom inthat non-linguistic as well as linguistic communication expresses relations to artifacts and other people.

4.2. Arranging the classroom

The analysis centers on cohesive relations in the teacher’s discourse, including the elements contributing to prolepsis(using the past to project the future) in teacher planning as it occurs across multiple timescales. We use the termintratextual cohesion to refer to the features of the internal unity of a text, including endophoric references: thosereferences from one part of the text to another. Intertextual cohesion refers to the range of cohesive relations beyondthe immediate text, to other prior, concurrent, and future texts in the semiotic ecology. Extratextual cohesion refers tonon-textual elements of the semiotic ecology (people, artifacts and interactions). This latter form lacks the precisionof the endophoric references described by Halliday and Hasan (1976), but makes possible the interpretation of texteither spoken in descriptive explanation of the semiotic ecology or while drawing information from the it. We codethe excerpt below in the following manner: Bold indicates reference to future elements of the semiotic ecology; italicssignify past reference; and underline indicates extratextual (exophoric) reference. Square brackets clarify extratextualreferences, where pointing or eye gazes link to material artifacts.

We begin with Jeanne explaining to Bill how she was reconfiguring her classroom in the summer between herfirst and second year teaching, gesturing as she made extratextual references. The field is one of explanation. Co-investigation characterizes the tenor, and the conversation is multimodal with speech accompanied by pointing and eyegaze direction. Fig. 1 illustrates the “targets” of extratextual references to the classroom.

J: I moved the circle table over mostly because I wanted to make a separate meeting area too. So there are two meetingareas now. There will be another easel, right by the black board. There’s a red rug, and I’ve got two yellow rugs.B: Why two meeting areas?J: Well, because I have the CM [collaborative model] now, this year. So I’m going to have two teachers in here.There will be two teachers, me and Grace. And, um, so I have a higher population of special ed. children, so thisway I have more leverage. I can break kids up. Grace and I can say OK you take the same lesson, differentiate it,


Fig. 1. The classroom arrangement in January of the second year is synomorphic to the schedule of the day’s lessons.

but we can actually do it at the same time. Two places to work. I can meet with reading groups over there. . ..J: What’s also going to happen is that this new meeting area [yellow rug] is going to have more math stuff over here.So we’ll do more math things because the screen is right there [next to the yellow rug]. So I can pull the screen downand most of the kids should be able to sit there [yellow rug] or at a table. All the kids will be able to stay right there[yellow rug] and see the screen. Maybe grab a clipboard and that’s easy. And then the other one [red rug] I’m goingto keep more for literacy, read alouds, I’ll put the big book holder, the chart thing, the schedule.J: Morning meeting will be in the same place [red rug]. But I’ll have more leverage. I finally have a place for thatchart thing, right there next to you. I won’t have to move it, I’ll just have to move the children.

The utterance “What’s also going to happen is that this new meeting area [yellow rug] is going to have moremath stuff over here.” includes extratextual, past and future references. Extratextually, the items “new meeting area”,“math stuff”, and “over here” locate the identification of these references, pointing to the material environment, outsidethe spoken text of the conversation. The use of “more” is a comparison to the previous year. The reference items “goingto happen” and “going to have” are references that identify Jeanne’s projection into future activity. “Only a culture-using human being can “reach into” the cultural past, project it into the future, and then “carry” that conceptual future“back” into the present to create the sociocultural environment of the newcomer” (Cole, 1996, p. 186).

None of these items contribute to the internal cohesion of the spoken text, yet they are required for interpretingJeanne’s explanation of how she was reconfiguring the material elements of the classroom to be synomorphic withthe forms of social organization that she was anticipating (Table 1). The unit of analysis in this episode necessarilyextends beyond the text to include material artifacts and future actions. In this unit, i.e. the semiotic ecology, cohesivereferences (that which makes the communication “hang together”) span between linguistic and nonlinguistic elementsof the ecology in its past, present and future.

Jeanne makes past, future and extratextual reference in the statement “Morning meeting will be in the same place.”with “same place” implicitly meaning the “same place as last year”. As in Cole’s example of prolepsis (1996, p.


Table 1Lessons appear as items on the Day Schedule on the white board (left), and the artifacts that primarily function in each lesson (right)

Day Schedule Synomorphic artifacts

Friday, 21 January 2005Jobs-choice AllMeeting 1, 2, 3Word wall 1, 9, 10, 11Math 4, 5, 6Snack 9, 10, 11Simple machines AllRead aloud 1, 2, 3Mini math 9, 10, 11Lunch Not applicableRecess Not applicableOpen circle 4Gym Not applicableWord work 9, 10, 11Reading workshop AllWriting workshop 9, 10, 11Jobs AllGood byes All

183–187), Jeanne’s explanation crosses multiple time scales. Her verbal description spans seconds, e.g., “So I can pullthe screen down and most of the kids should be able to sit there.” The actions she describes span seconds, perhapsminutes. In past and future reference, however, her description spans 2 years, drawing upon her prior year of teachingto anticipate the year to come. In enacting her long-term goal of making the classroom to be more inclusive of the useof centers, the progression takes up the timescale of Jeanne’s professional development.

The extratextual references are a key to understanding how Jeanne organizes the processes of meaning making withher children. Spatial configurations of the classroom artifacts function in her planning for an entire school year andrelate to her ideas about diversity in children’s learning, the role of adults, and the curriculum. For example, she placesrelevant artifacts within sight “All the kids will be able to stay right there and see the screen.”, and, in part, by locatingrelevant artifacts within easy reach, “Maybe grab a clipboard and that’s easy.” As Jeanne foresees the new arrangementsof physical elements of the classroom, she is also transforming them, on a longer time scale, to be synomorphic tothe lessons and social organization that she is anticipating. Her locating the teaching and learning of math in one areaand literacy in another, both restricts and expands active meaning potentials by privileging learning of the respectivethematic content, when she and the children gather in proximity to each other. Math meaning potentials are privilegedwhile on the yellow rug and literacy potentials are privileged while on the red rug.

4.3. Independent reading

First grade teachers face a fundamental contradiction in the nature of schooling, arising from the diversity ofchildren’s individual development and the uniformity implied by specific genres of school discourse, activity structuresand curricula (Lemke, 1990; Miettinen, 1999; Wells, 2002). How does a teacher account for children’s differences indevelopment, while attending to the other demands of teaching? This is a special concern in literacy, where readingand writing abilities can vary considerably from one child to the next.

Several times per year Jeanne assesses each child’s level of reading ability as the basis for selecting what books areavailable in their Reading Bins, which are small plastic containers capable of holding approximately two dozen books.The books are sorted by developmental level (for both guided and independent reading), genre, series, or publisher(Fountas & Pinell, 2005). Based on her evaluations, Jeanne places clothespins with children’s names on them ondifferent bins. Throughout the year, Jeanne changes both the content of the bin and which children access the bin,taking into account each child’s content interest as well as reading ability.

This practice is one of the ways Jeanne adapts material classroom resources to the children’s reading abilities. Herselection of texts provides both support and challenge. Books in the bins shape the active meaning potential for each


child both in learning how to read at a higher level, and in the content that each book holds for the child. When the childsucceeds in reading the text, it becomes an “actualized potential” (Halliday, 1978). We can consider the book bins asphysical embodiments of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, since they contain texts that are slightly ahead ofthe children’s current semiotic potential. The zone of proximal development is not, therefore, limited to moment-to-moment interactions, direct guidance by an adult or a more capable peer (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86) or to purely linguisticcomponents (Daniels, 2001; Kozulin, 1998; Wells, 1994). Jeanne’s actions of assessing the children and configuringtheir Reading Bins to provide the texts reflect her preparation in advance, for each child. In consequence, it doesnot meet restricted definitions of the zone of proximal development, but rather creates the requisite conditions for it.In short, it allows us to illustrate a premise of the semiotic ecology (system) orientation that we have adopted, thatinter-mental guidance and collaboration can spread across time, space, and mediational artifacts (Brown et al., 1993;Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993).

However, the Readings Bins and their contents do not simply define a part of a zone of proximal development foreach child. In the classroom semiotic ecology, the Reading Bin locations are synomorphic to independent and guidedreading, mediating social relations and communication. In Jeanne’s first year, she located the bins in a common areanear the classroom library, which she found effective in encouraging the children to talk about the books they werereading. In her second year, the children were more easily distracted by off task conversations. The proximity of otherstudents offered opportunities to interact socially and, without overt regulation by the teacher, the children were unableto stay on task. Jeanne changed the locations of the Reading Bins, spreading them throughout the room, diffusing thecongregations in side-talk. The locations of the bins do not dictate how independent reading will take place; rather,their spatial arrangements are both dynamic traces of what happens during independent reading and are mediationalof it.

4.4. Quick Images

In November of Jeanne’s second year, Bill observed her teaching the children geometrical shapes with the QuickImages lesson provided by the mathematics curriculum (TERC, 1998). The goal of Quick Images is to promotevisualization skills. At the time of this lesson, Quick Images was a relatively new lesson with which the children werenot fully familiar. The lesson proceeds by enacting a staged script. First, the children take seats at tables near the yellowrug math area and place their hands on their laps. Then Jeanne displays a geometric image on the overhead projector.Only after she turns off the projector does Jeanne allow the children to redraw the image from memory. When theyhave completed their drawing, Jeanne turns on the projector so they can check their work. After she turns the projectoroff a second time, the children revise their drawings. She turns the projector on for a third time so the children cancomplete a final confirmation and discuss how they created their copies. This script initially challenges students in twoways. They must remember when they can make the drawings, and they must regulate their impulses to draw whileJeanne is presenting the target image.

The actions among Jeanne and the children follow a turn-taking pattern, with Jeanne and the children synchronouslyalternating in the acting out of each step. The synchronization among the children, taking their turn together, happensin part because they share a visual field that includes both Jeanne and the overhead projector, and in part by theirremembering the rules for participation. When the projector is off, they draw. When it is on, they observe withoutpencils in their hands. If one student forgets, or cannot self-regulate, then Jeanne, who positions herself to see all thechildren, verbally reminds the child what he or she is supposed to do.

Jeanne helps the children locate themselves near the overhead projector so that they can all see the screen, hearothers, and be heard by others during class discussion. To the left behind Jeanne is an easel displaying shapes and wordsdescribing triangles and quadrilaterals that Jeanne and the children previously constructed. Immediately behind her isa number chart and to its right is a poster, describing general definitions of geometric shapes. The yellow rug matharea concentrates the semiotic resources that are synomorphic to the Quick Images pedagogical and math registers.That is to say, both the easel and the poster hold geometric images and their descriptions, and it is about this topicthat the children will be drawing and speaking. When the children extract information from, or make reference to,these resources, and others in the math area during their talk, the materials function intertextually to enrich their activemeaning potentials, using the language of mathematics.

Before the lesson begins, Jeanne and the children revisit the series of steps in a triadic (Initiate–Respond–Followup) discourse pattern (Cazden, 1988; Lemke, 1990; Stubbs, 1983; Wells, 1999) in what Christie (1991, 1995) terms


“task orientation” of the pedagogical (regulative) register. Aware of the children’s still-developing abilities to rememberand to attend to academic tasks, Jeanne prepares the children by making past and future references, re-establishingthe Quick Images field, i.e. how the lesson takes place. We have labeled the responses of many students in unison as“chorus” in the following text excerpt, coded for cohesive references.

Jeanne: All right. Let’s see if this works. [Turns on overhead projector with a sample transparency] Oh good, OK.Who can tell me how this. . . works? How does Quick Images work? . . .You’ve been practicing this. Jason? What’sthe first thing we do?Jason: You put up the shapes. . .Jeanne: I put the shape up. Do you draw it then?Chorus: No.Jeanne: What do you do?Jason: You just. . .Jeanne: You just?Chorus: Look at it.Jeanne: Look at it. Hmm. So right now, do you need pencils?Chorus: No.Jeanne: No. So I should see pencils down. . . Your book is open to the next clean page however, so you’re ready todraw. . . And your hands are on your lap. . . And the next thing we do is. . . is what?

Jeanne draws upon one of the first steps in the script, the projection of a geometric image on the screen to re-establishthe content register (Christie, 1991). She queries the children, making extratextual reference to the screen and a pastreference to having done this lesson before “Who can tell me how this. . . works? How does Quick Images work?. . .You’ve been practicing this.” Later, Jeanne’s strategy of reiterating what the children say, in temporal proximityto their utterances, and her use of the conjunction “and” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), build cohesion in the discoursedescribing what the class is about to do. Jeanne’s extratextual references to the pencils, books, and the children’s handsprojects the content register by directing the children to configure these extratextual resources (including their ownbodies) to participate in the Quick Images lesson.

The pedagogical register does more than “project”, or make operational, the content register that is to followmicrogenetically. It also functions intertextually and extratextually on a longer timescale to prepare all Quick Imagelessons to follow in the coming weeks by mediating improvement in the children’s memory of the script. Jeanne’sexplicit expectation “So I should see pencils down”, followed conjunctively with the directives for the childrento configure books and hands, places the children’s bodies and their materials in the best position to participatein Quick Images. This provides more than the potential to remember the staged script cognitively, i.e. “in thehead”; it also provides the potential for the children to remember how they position their bodies when doing QuickImages.

From an ecological perspective, the triadic I–R–F discourse pattern is a form of communication with a singleverbal-auditory channel shared by the whole class and enacted through turn taking. Its functioning depends on themanagement of space: the teacher organizes the children within hearing range of her and each other so that they can allspeak and be heard with normal sound volume. In tenor, the I–R–F also embodies a power differential; the meanings ofthose who speak become privileged over those who remain silent. In the next excerpt, Jeanne and the children engagein triadic discourse about the meaning of a square.

Jeanne: What makes it a square? Why is that a square and not a rhombus or a rectangle or something else? Cynthia?Cynthia: All the lines are straight.Jeanne: All the lines are straight. They’re not tipped. They’re not in a diagonal. Right? . . . What else makes it a square,about those sides? . . . Chris?Chris: They’re all even.Jeanne: They are all even? Do you mean the length?[Chris nods]Jeanne: They’re all the same size. They’re all the same length.


Chris: Uh huh.Jeanne: Nice job.

With the content register of Quick Images operational, Jeanne helps the children make meaning of what constitutesa square. This is meaning making on two dimensions. First, the children are coming to know the requirements thatthe mathematical community shares for a shape to qualify as a square. Second, the children are not engaging in thistask individually but through the ecology of triadic discourse, they are sharing their thoughts with each other and theteacher.

The second text excerpt is characterized by a much greater lexical density (Halliday & Martin, 1993) of mathematicslanguage than the first. Mathematical terms define each other in close relation. The description of the square puts itinto relation with diagonals, sides, lengths, lines, and straight lines. Rephrasing the children’s utterances functionsin two ways. Rewording what Chris offers with “They are all even? Do you mean the length?” Jeanne checks herunderstanding, openly interpreting his utterance, and initiating an exchange in which Chris makes verification bygestural response. By rephrasing what the children say using the language of math in temporal proximity to theirutterances, she extends the children’s explanations, interjecting curriculum words as substitutes for the everyday termsthat the students offer. The proximity in time between the child’s utterance and Jeanne’s rephrasing carries the implicitmessage that her words have the same meaning as that of the child. “Words are learnt not as in a dictionary but as ina thesaurus, each one being progressively located, in the expanding topological space, by reference to the “others” towhich it is taxonomically related” (Halliday, 1993, p. 99).

The dense lexicon of mathematics poses special challenges to the first grade teacher who must cope with herchildren’s still-developing attention and memory. Jeanne’s question “What makes it a square?” makes extratextualreference to the projected image, which appeared in the children’s visual field during the entire episode. The pro-jection served a second, continuously visible mode of communication, supplementing the single verbal channel oftriadic discourse in which the sounds of utterances are relatively short-lived. The children observed the square, madeinterpretations from it, and it served as a reference in their discussion, contributing extratextually to the meanings theywere making. Supported by studies of children’s superior recall in context (Hazen & Volk-Hudson, 1984; Kannass,Plumert, McDermott, Moore, & Durich, 2004; NICHD, 2005a), we suggest that the spatial arrangement of children,teacher, and projected image functioned in, i.e. the yellow rug area was synomorphic to, maintaining a joint focus ofattention. As indicated by the differences in lexical density and in the number of extratextual references, we posit thatthe artifacts in the yellow rug area simultaneously functioned in making the content register operational.

4.5. Word study

It is mid-morning at the end of January in Jeanne’s first year and most of her children are collaboratively workingon their word study, doing buddy quizzes, and talking in “four-inch voices”, i.e. quiet talk at tables that only partnersare able to hear. Simultaneously, Jeanne is conducting a guided reading group with two girls at the Circle Table. Threechildren are in the fore ground in this episode: Neal, Anthony, and Ella. Neal has been a challenging student since thebeginning of the year, expressing himself physically and aggressively with other children and sometimes with adults.He has had difficulty making transitions between independent tasks and his ability to direct himself during independentreading and word study has progressed more slowly than that of the other children. We observed him to cease readingwhen he labored to decode two or three words on a page. Sometimes, in this situation, he would talk out loud or disruptanother student’s reading. Occasionally in class and on the playground Neal has expressed himself aggressively towardAnthony.

After returning from the hall, Neal stands on the edge of the Red Rug, facing the hexagonal table, motionless.Neal’s word study partner is not present in the room. He begins voicing complaints about his missing partner whenJeanne notices. Jeanne softly calls “Neal” while looking in his direction. Neal does not respond. After a three secondpause, she calls his name again. Neal responds and walks to the side of the Circle Table nearest the rug, oppositewhere Jeanne is sitting. Jeanne gestures with her arm and pointed finger for him to move around the table to her side.The gesture begins with Jeanne’s hand pointing toward Neal, sweeping her arm around the perimeter of the table, andfinally pointing near where she is sitting. She does so silently so it will not disturb the rest of the children. In parallel,she intends her silent gesture to signify to Neal that the ensuing communication between them should also be hushed.Again, Neal does not respond. Two to three seconds later, Jeanne repeats the gesture.


Neal walks around the table, in the direction that Jeanne had gestured and stands next to her. With a whisperingvoice, she acknowledges that his partner is not in the room and indicates that he should ask Anthony and Ella to form atrio with him. Jeanne’s choice of Anthony and Ella is deliberate, drawing upon her experience with them. Both childrenhave been responsible and have worked well with Neal even when he was being obstinate. Silently Neal walks over toAnthony, sitting at the Rocket Ship table. While doing so he makes eye contact with Jeanne. She returns the gaze in partto assure him, and, in part, so that she may intervene if there is a problem. With a slight scowl, he silently extends hishand in a tight fist toward Anthony, palm up, stopping at eye level within reach of Anthony’s face. He slowly extendsand repeatedly flexes his index finger “come here”, while continuing to make a stern face.

Anthony looks at Jeanne, as if puzzled, perhaps worried, slightly raising his shoulders. Jeanne nods to Anthonyaffirmatively. Neal repeats his gesture. Anthony stands and follows Neal to where the word study folders are located.Ella joins them and Jeanne makes a hushed verbal suggestion to the three of them to move to the unoccupied CurvyTable for more room. Jeanne’s suggestion serves two purposes: to give all three the room to complete their tasks and forNeal to succeed in a pro-social interaction. Anthony’s looking to Jeanne, followed by her returned gaze and nod, andthen Anthony’s departure with Neal, completes an Initiate–Reply–Follow up sequence entirely without an exchangeof words.

Anthony’s looking to Jeanne, as well as Neal’s eye contact with Jeanne, are forms of social referencing thatresearchers have observed to develop between infants and their caregivers and to occur between adults (Striano &Rochat, 2000; Walden & Ogan, 1988). When an infant capable of social referencing encounters an ambiguous orsurprising situation, he will look to his caregiver. The child relies upon the response of the adult to guide his reaction.In other words, and quite arguably, the child trusts the adult. Social referencing, a form of emotional communication,may imply social relations of trust and expectation. We interpret Anthony’s surprised response to Neal to indicate thathe does not expect Neal to be conveying Jeanne’s directive.

We ourselves can see a second and confusing significance in Neal’s gesture. First, Neal clenches his hand in a fist,arm extended toward Anthony, just before he begins the beckoning movements of his index finger. The occurrencetogether of the two gestures in time, being expressed spatially in the same fist, together with the stern face, couldsimply be interpreted as “Come with me, I want to hit you”. We interpret Neal’s gesture polysemically and we findit highly likely that Anthony does also, based on his 5-month history of being around Neal and being the target ofaggression. Anthony seeks to resolve the uncertainty by looking for Jeanne’s response, and in the 5 months of sharedhistory, Jeanne has learned to be ready to offer her support.

But it is more than just the one child’s proclivity for, and history of, aggression that contributes to the semiosis ofthis moment. During this episode, most of Jeanne’s children were doing “buddy-quizzes”: a task highly independentof the teacher’s oversight and unrealizable in September. Five months of work by the children, together with Jeanne’sconcentrated efforts toward teaching them how to become more independent learners, has achieved the developmentof this content register. Once Jeanne had succeeded in helping her children learn the collaborative word study register,e.g. using 4-inch voices, she was able to work closely with one or two children while the rest work without her.Jeanne’s understanding of how well Ella and Anthony could work with Neal has itself developed as she observed herchildren working on prior collaborative tasks. Jeanne and the children were able to understand each other and theirunspoken text through a background of earlier texts they co-constructed. In Learning How to Mean, Halliday (1975)theorized individual dimensions of language and social development: “A child’s construction of a semantic system andhis construction of a social system take place side by side, as two aspects of a single unitary process” (p. 21). Thisepisode illustrates the necessity of broadening the analysis to account for the cohesiveness of activity throughout theclassroom. Through their history of communicating and acting together, the children and the teacher construct sharedsemiotic and social systems, which constitute, in part, core elements of their semiotic ecology.

The design of the full classroom is synomorphic to the operation of both the pedagogical and content registers;each operating simultaneously as Jeanne helped Neal regroup with Anthony and Ella and as the rest of the childrenaccomplished buddy-quizzes. Jeanne has designed the classroom layout to make supervision, movement, and collabo-ration happen effectively. Her position at the circle table enables her to see into every nook of the classroom and in thisepisode, she is able to exchange gazes with Neal. Her position makes her accessible to the children, which she utilizedwhen she silently summoned Neal to her. The layout of the children’s tables enables them to sit close together, facingeach other, so that they may use their 4-inch voices. In facing their partners, the children also turn away from the othergroups that are nearest to them, reducing the sound volume of other groups’ potentially disruptive talk. Jeanne and herchildren benefit from the spatial relation of sound’s volume to the distance it travels; decreasing in value with increasing


distance. Four-inch voices fall below the threshold of hearing another child who is not at the same table. Through thespatial dependence of sound, hence the spatial dependence of talk, the physical locations and orientations of peopleand artifacts privilege some communications (and meanings) over others. The layout of the tables is synomorphic tothe simultaneous conversations that take place during collaborative learning.

4.6. No library

On a Thursday morning at the end of April, Jeanne’s children are percolating into their classroom to begin theschool day. As indicated by the Job Schedule, they have group tasks to complete before they can choose an activityto fill the time before the formal start of lessons. Cyril walks across the Rug toward the white board where the DaySchedule appears and he examines it.4 He blurts “Oh”, and continues softly “me. Is this? Is this me. . . or are we havin’nothin?” A moment later, he announces, “We’re not having anything!” After further examining the Day Schedule foranother 12 s, Cyril turns and walks away from the white board, toward Ms. Smith, proclaiming, “Ms. Smith. There’sno library today!”

Jared, who is standing nearby, walks across the Rug and looks at the Day Schedule (hereafter simply called schedule).He places his left and right hands respectively to the left and right of each item as he reads down the schedule. Gestureand schedule-item co-locate in spatial proximity, with Jared’s hands bracketing his vision on the line he is reading.Reaching the bottom he exclaims, “No library!” He turns in the direction of Ms. Smith and loudly laments, “OH! Ilove library!” Jared returns to the white board as Takii, Peter, and Janie join him and he declares again, “No Library!”All four children look at the schedule and Takii dramatically calls out, “We’ve lost library forever!” After a coupleof seconds, Takii, Peter, and Jared withdraw while Janie stays to examine the schedule. She says softly to herself,“Where’s. ah. Where’s library?” She looks further for a full 16 s, then turns away and walks towards Ms Smith. Shedeclares, “Mrs. Smith! You forgot library!”

Jeanne does not ask her children to read the schedule on their own. Since the first day of school however, she and herchildren have read the schedule aloud during Morning Meeting. On the first day, she explained the item called “Jobs”that always appears at the top of the schedule. Their weekly group assignments appear in a separate Job Schedule. ByApril, some of the children have begun reading the schedule on their own, anticipating what the day holds for them.Today they have found a mistake in the schedule, and while minor, the mistake is an artifact that functions in organizingtheir day.

The register of this episode differs from those previously described. First, the field is one of “choice” or free time.There are no formal requirements for the children to read the schedule—they do so of their own choosing. Second theteacher’s role in the communication has changed from being immediate to being a step removed—not participatingdirectly, but as the one who was responsible for creating the central mediating artifact, the Day Schedule. Third, asthey read the schedule, Cyril, Jared, and Janie mostly engage in monologue. Being close enough to overhear Cyril,Jared comes to the whiteboard. More children join Jared after he and Cyril broadcast in Jeanne’s direction that thereis a missing item.

The joint focus of attention for these students, “Library”, is a lexical item that they cannot read, because it does notappear on the schedule; rather, the students’ discourse makes intertextual reference to the “Library” of prior Thursdayschedules. The synomorphy between the children’s making a reference to the past and the day schedule is in itshighly visible location: children can easily access it every day, especially during morning meeting. The synomorphicrelation, however, is not just simply “between the pattern of behavior occurring within the class and the pattern ofnon-behavioral components, the behavior objects” (Barker, 1968, p. 17). Week-by-week appearances of “Library” onThursday’s schedule have built the socially shared expectation that the item will appear again on this particular day.

According to literacy assessments at the beginning of the school year, many children were reading at a level belowthat necessary to observe the item’s absence. However, at this moment, both Cyril and Jared exhibit self-regulationstrategies for processing the schedule. Cyril speaks aloud, questioning his interpretation “Is this me. . . or are we havin’nothin?” and then re-reads the schedule. Jeanne’s assessments put Jared as one of the top readers in the class. Hisstrategy is to place his hands on either side of the schedule item that he is reading, adding visual focus to the denselexicon and complex spatiality of the schedule, bringing his fingers into spatial proximity with the line he is reading,

4 Table 1 shows a sample Day Schedule.


moving from item to item down the list. The path of Jared’s actions exemplify how early readers adapt to the directionalproperties of print: orienting to the text, recognizing top to bottom, and left to right, serial order (Clay, 1991). Janieapplies a different strategy—that of scanning the whole schedule for the word she knows (library). After completing thesearch but not finding it, she then approaches Jeanne with the error. She takes much more time to verify that “Library”does not appear in the schedule. Jeanne’s assessments show that she was not able to read the schedule on her own atthe beginning of the year. We consider her reading the schedule independently to be an indicator of how the semioticecology of this classroom addressed the contradiction between diversity in children’s development and the uniformityof school curricula.

The children’s reactions to the absence of “Library” are as varied as their reading abilities. Cyril and Jared do notquestion the schedule, rather, Cyril simply attempts to bring it to Jeanne’s attention, and Jared moves on after lamenting.Takii dramatically extends a consequence “We’ve lost library forever!” Once Janie made sure that “Library” was noton the schedule however, she makes a clear proactive response: “Mrs. Smith! You forgot library!” Janie projects theschedule proleptically, drawing from past schedules to anticipate what the day holds ahead, and when the postedschedule appears in conflict, she declares it a mistake. Janie’s moment of prolepsis is inseparable from her developingintertextuality. Furthermore, the tenor is one in which she is free to point out her teacher’s mistake—but then Jeannehas set the stage for this moment. Jeanne applies the strategy of deliberately making mistakes in front of students andthen bringing the error to the students’ attention. She intends this in part to ease the children’s anxiety about makingmistakes, but it has another benefit. She has also developed relationships in which the children can be proactive aboutcorrecting her mistakes.

5. Semiotic proximity

We have identified relationships among meaning making processes and elements of context. We find it necessaryto extend the meaning of cohesion to extratextual elements, including spoken references as well as gestures and eyegazes, enabling a more comprehensive theoretical description of the semiotic relations enacted in the multiply channeledcommunication that we observed in and around the first grade classroom. All three theoretical frameworks contributeto extending the concept of cohesion. Intratextual cohesive references may span from one sentence to the next, oracross the whole text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Intratextual cohesion is multiply scaled, interrelated across text andtime, as speaking, listening, writing, and reading of a text occurs sequentially occur over time: “a text unfolds in realtime and directionality is built into it” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 19).

Intertextual cohesion generates semiotic unity with other texts: prior, future, and concurrent. Intertextual cohesionextends meaning making across longer timescales, beyond that of the immediate text. Two episodes show that thepatterning of lessons on any given day relies upon the cohesion that intertextuality supplies from day to day. Specifically,as Jeanne begins the Quick Images lesson, she refers to prior lessons and discussions “You’ve been practicing this.”and “How does Quick Images work?” In the No Library episode, the joint focus of attention, “Library”, does notappear on the schedule. Rather, the students make implicit intertextual reference to the “Library” of prior Thursdays.Furthermore, the physical classroom’s intertextuality expands over the time scale of the school year. The room’s wallsstart out bare in September. Over time, the walls fill with the children’s contributions. Intertextual cohesion not onlyspans across the school year in any particular grade’s curriculum, but also in the case of the math and the socialdevelopment curriculum, across the 5-year time scale that a child spends at the school. Lemke’s paper (1985) refers toHasan’s work on the cohesive properties of text and describes “interlocking nodes of intertextual connection” (p. 281),interrelating texts, thematic systems, events and sequences of social activity. While Lemke’s paper does not elaboratethe relations between cohesion and intertextuality, it has been seminal in our analysis.

Socio-cultural cohesion is the set of semiotic resources for making social organization, e.g. activity systems(Engestrom, 1987, 1991, 1993) and activity structures (Lemke, 1990), hang together, relating the ideality of mediationalmeans among people in the present, past and future. The cohesion of activity systems (institutions) is a direct reflectionof the systemic, relational nature of an activity system, which: “integrates the subject, the object and the instruments(material tools as well as signs and symbols) into a unified whole” (Engestrom, 1993, p. 67), where “subject” refersto a plurality. At the social scale of the entire school, each adult works toward the objective of establishing cohesionacross the children’s entire academic trajectory. The principal coordinated the teachers and other professionals todevelop school-wide shared practices and understandings in literacy, and to appropriate common mathematics andsocial development curricula.


At the social organizational scale of the classroom, socio-cultural cohesion is discernible in the coordinated actionsof Jeanne and her children, and stems from functional relationships in the semiotic ecology within and across activitystructures. For example, during the Word Study episode, Neal, Anthony, and Ella re-organize to form a new trio withJeanne’s guidance while the other children continue working. The children and Jeanne drew upon their shared semioticand social systems, co-constructed over the prior 5 months, to communicate and effectively regroup, despite theirsometimes limited linguistic exchanges. The social relations of trust and expectation developed between Anthony andJeanne functioned in preserving the operation of the pedagogical register in the face of Neal’s potentially disruptivesign. More abstractly, the pedagogical register functioned in relation to the co-occurring content register: The silence,in which the pedagogical register almost entirely operated, safeguarded buddy-quizzes against interruption.

Physical-cultural cohesion is a set of semiotic resources that physical space, including spatial organization and thephysical properties of materials, brings to culture-specific meaning making processes. “In these activities, “things”contribute to solutions every bit as much as “minds” do; information and meaning is coded into configurations of objects,material constraints, and possible environmental options” (Lemke, 1997, p. 38). The relationships of physical space tomeaning making are patterned and recurring. Our use of synomorphy outlines relationships between forms of physicalityand meaning-making activity. The physical organization of the classroom both reflects and non-deterministically shapesthe social organization occurring with and within it.

The spatial configuration of artifacts functions in maintaining joint attention and making operational the contentregister. When occupying a physical-cultural space, i.e. a synomorph, instances of culture-specific meanings aremore prominent and available to the child than those outside the area, e.g. the math and literacy areas are composedof a propinquity of related thematic artifacts. Furthermore, the physical dimensions of people and things and theirconfigurations in the space may obscure those outside the space by narrowing or reducing visual and auditory fields. Onthe yellow rug, mathematical signs surrounding Jeanne’s presentation of the target image mostly occupy the children’svisual field. During Word Study, the children turn their backs to all but their partners, and speak in 4-inch voices so asnot to disrupt other groups. On a larger physical scale, the walls of the classroom restrict the visual and auditory fieldsof all participants, contributing to what the school development literature has labeled the “isolation of the classroom”.Spatial configuration alone is co-relational to, not causal of, meaning making. At the beginning of Jeanne’s secondyear, she located the Reading Bins in one area close to the classroom library, as she had the previous year. Later on, shefound that, unlike the first year, her children were not chatting about the books they were reading, but were engagingin side conversations. This compelled her to spread the bins throughout the room to reduce the children’s off taskbehavior.

Spatial configurations mediate regulative processes, with physical proximity making an essential contribution.When the children join Jeanne on the Red Rug, there is enough space between them that they may fidget, but they arealso constrained in the degree of movement by the nearness of other children. We have observed that when childrenmoved more than the space separating them from others, they imposed upon other children, making physical contact.After the contact, they often responded to reduce their movement. Jeanne seats children within reach of her whohave difficulty with self-regulation. Without a word, she touches the child’s shoulder or casts a glance when the childacts out, helping the child act within the content register, and continuing the lesson for the rest of the class withoutpause.

Contextual cohesion is the greater whole of which there are non-exclusive socio-cultural, physical-cultural, intratex-tual, and intertextual elemental dimensions. Defining each as contributing to the total set of semiotic resources availableto people engaged in joint activity provides a conceptual method for attributing meaning potential in relation to morethan language. Places and things, however, do not offer meaning potentials as widely as language, but do so more locally,to those few who frequently occupy the synomorph, use the artifact, and see or make the gesture. Lacking any gram-matical structure or lexicon, the meaning potentials that can be associated with places and things are not systematic, butdependent upon past practice and participation. Consequently, the first grade classroom with all its accouterments seemsstrange and complex to the newcomer, while it is quite familiar and meaningful to the children and teacher who occupy itevery day. Furthermore, this classroom is not one of “de-contextualized, independent text” (Miettinen, 1999, p. 326), butone with a highly cohesive context supporting the development of children’s literacy, mathematics, and social-emotionalcompetency.

Nevertheless, such an expansion of Halliday’s notion of meaning potential, made in recognition of Vygotsky’s zoneof proximal development, allows the possibility that assistance may not be immediate, but may spread across time,space, people, texts, and other mediational artifacts. The observations in this paper support this thesis; in particular,


the locations and orientations of children and tables in the Word Study episode assist in the simultaneous operations ofthe regulative and content registers. Regarding literacy instruction, the functions of the Reading Bins are to shape andextend the meaning potential of each child at any one time with the books the teacher selects, based upon both literacyassessments and knowledge of the child’s interests. Concerning memory, the operation of the pedagogical register toproject the content register and the highly visible Day Schedule serve to remind children what they have been doingand inform them of what they are about to do.5

How are children able to attend to meanings that are ahead of their current potential? We note a general pattern ofproximity in the ways the people make meanings and make meanings possible with regard to the four dimensions ofcontextual cohesion we have identified. The degree of intratextual cohesion in written text depends upon nearness intext and collocation strength: The “cohesive force that is exerted between any pair of lexical items” is a function ofthe separation between the items by other items and the relative probability with which words occur together. Degreesof intertextual and socio-cultural cohesion relate to closeness in events and activity as well as meaning (thematicsystem).

People’s activity privileges meanings specific to that activity, framing how, in relation to Halliday’s concept ofregister, activity actualizes meaning potential. Furthermore, actions mediated by an artifact define its function, i.e.the meaning potential it actualizes in use. Consequently, an artifact having one meaning in one activity may have adifferent meaning in a different activity. For example, in the teacher-planning episode, the tables play a part in Jeanne’svisualization of the upcoming year. In the Word Study episode, the very same tables support the children engaging inthe content register with 4-inch voices. Framed this way, a system of activity is a concentration of meaning potentialsthat its elements actualize. Meaning making occurs ecologically both at the scale of the activity system and in the moreconcentrated scale of activity structures.

Finally, degrees of physical-cultural cohesion relate how closeness in space and time function in actualizing meaningpotentials. Considering language, print itself takes space and has a directionality that children master as they begin toread (Clay, 1991), e.g. as the children learn to read the Day Schedule, they come to relate the descending order of itemswith the times at which lessons occur during the day. Because print takes space, cohesion between sentences not onlyvaries with the amount of text in between, it also varies with the amount of space. We find that children’s meaningmaking is also subject to the constraints of time. In the Quick Images episode, the nearness in time between the child’sutterance and Jeanne’s rephrasing carries the implicit message that her words, the curriculum words, relate to thoseexpressed by the child.

Jeanne and her children manage the semiotic complexity of academic work by altering which meanings are proximalin the four dimensions of contextual cohesion, thereby restricting the innumerable options of the classroom’s richsemiotic space. The Yellow and Red Rug areas privilege mathematics and literacy learning, as do their respectiveregisters. Reading Bins concentrate those books that are within or slightly ahead of each child’s meaning potential tobe within easy reach for independent and guided reading. The books are both within spatial proximity and within theproximal development of the children’s textural abilities. In the No Library episode, Jared’s placing of his fingers oneither side of the schedule’s items focused his attention toward each item he was reading. In the Word Study episode,the proximity of Neal’s gestures merged them into one polyseme, yet privileged the aggressive meaning over the other.

This article attempts to explain teaching and learning by providing ways to relate context to meaning making. Thisarticle has not reduced the complexity of the classroom, but has only begun to articulate it. In education, people arrangepotential meanings in space and time, across forms of social organization, privileging some meanings over others.We refer to the patterns of nearness in the four dimensions of contextual cohesion as semiotic proximity. While theconfigurations of artifacts, people and texts may span many scales of time, space, and social organization, the meaningpotentials they actualize are developmentally proximal.

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