Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday has studied linguistics in English, Chinese, and Japanese, among other languages. One of his discoveries is that it is in the social interaction that humans produce semiotic artifacts, e.g. language, to satisfy survival needs.

Gordon Wells from the University of California at Santa Cruz, has found close connections between Halliday's and Vygostky's ideas.

Halliday and Vygotsky make the following assumptions:

1. In order to understand any form of human behavior, it is necessary to adopt a genetic approach.

2. Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, development is dependent on the availability of tools; for intellectual development, semiotic tools are of particular importance.

3. Language is a particularly powerful semiotic tool because its semantic structure:

encodes the culture's theory of experience , including the knowledge associated with the use of all other tools;

enables its users to interact with each other in order to coordinate their activity and simultaneously to reflect on and share their interpretations of experience.

4. In ontogenesis, development is raised to new levels by the appropriation of the tools created by previous generations. In particular, in learning their mother tongue through situationally based conversation, children also appropriate the knowledge and practices of their culture.

In less technical words, Vygotsky and Halliday believe that language is at the basis of knowledge and is learned in the house, the street and the school. Now one can add that children also learn meaning online.