Alice’s rabbit: Vygotsky, Halliday, and the subtle science of showing what you mean

It is impossible to evaluate pedagogical interventions without observing changes in thinking. But it is impossible to observe directly any changes in thinking except our own, and self-reports are impossible to falsify or verify. Vygotsky also struggled with this problem early in his career, and concluded, on theoretical grounds, that thinking could be adequately described as the 'reflex of a reflex', and therefore verified as Pavlov had verified reflexes in dogs. He almost immediately found this inadequate for his experimental practice, and instead developed a 'functional methodic of double stimulation' which purported to bring 'inhibited reflexes' (i.e. thoughts) to the surface through a set of 'second-order stimuli'. This too turned out to be inadequate, and in his last years he began developing a 'semic' approach to consciousness—the science of showing what you mean through language. We use a Hallidayan interpretation of this approach to solve two problems at opposite ends of early years education: evaluating the child's first representations, and evaluating the response of initial teacher education trainees to a lecture, seminar, and video on the pedagogical practice of guided reading.